Volunteer Spirit Movement: The Socialization of Youth Self-Development in Bangkok Metropolitan Region

Abstract

The objectives of this research were 1) to study the pattern of youth volunteer spirit movement 2) to study factors promoting socialization through the volunteer movement. 3) to analyze the effects of youth volunteer spirit movement on self-development of youth. It is a qualitative research conducted in the documentary study, and interviewed 25 young key informants between the ages of 15-24 years and 7 experts, by purposive sampling. The research were content-analyzed. 

Research’s Findings were as follows:

1) The pattern of youth volunteer spirit movement is the idea and ideology that comes from the inspiration from the family and personal desire to give a collective help to solve social problems. Characteristics of volunteer work are several activities on social current issues and target groups support. The structure and system of volunteer work is divided into management administrative, documents, recreation and labor work. There is instilling ideas and operation, procedures and techniques for performing work and goals.

2) Factors promoting socialization through the volunteer movement is to learn from new social and environmental experiences, to learn from interacting with others, and to learn from the role of the contributor to others.

3) The volunteer spirit movement that affects the self-development of youth is divided into 3 aspects: physical, mental and intelligent. Physical effects include youth volunteers spending free time, have assertive personality, confidence and self-esteem. Mental effects are youth volunteers understand the emotional state of themselves and others, have feelings of patience. Iintelligent effects are developing self-responsibility with regulations, allocating time for personal work and public work, learning to give, having analytical processes, having responsibility for others, not creating trouble for others, having ability to adapt to live with others, having social responsibility, and believing that society is not a matter of anyone, but it belongs to everyone, so social action can start from yourself.