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Characteristics of Volunteers Who Deliver Health Education and Promotion: A Comparison with Organization Members and Program Participants

Division of Health Education, Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island

Judy D. DePue, EdD

Division of Behavioral Medicine at The Miriam Hospital

Charles J. Buehler, PhD

Technology Applications, Inc.

Thomas M. Lasater, PhD

Division of Health Education, Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island

Richard A. Carleton, MD

Division of Health Education, Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island

The use of volunteers in this culture for community health endeavors is an understudied area. Yet, there may be many potential benefits for utilizing volunteers in the delivery of community health education and promotion. Volunteers may have more immediate access to their peers, credibility, and familiarity with the cultural environment and or ganization elements. An assumption of volunteer use is that persons drawn from a targeted organization (or community subgroup) will be like other members. Such an assumption, however, should be confirmed or disproved. This article compares a sample of volunteers to a sample of members from organizations from which the volunteers were recruited. The paper also compares the volunteers to a sample of program participants. The par ticipants were persons to whom the volunteers delivered CVD prevention programming and, in most cases, were also organization members. Collectively using the variables under investigation, multivariate analyses of variance found that the volunteers were different from the organization members, and different from program participants. To assess differences between the samples on each individual variable, univariate tests were conducted stratifying the samples by age. Statistically significant differences were found regarding organization activity, formal education level, success with past health habit change, health self-assessment, occupation, gender, and marital status.

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