National scout organization of Slovenia is the biggest youth organization in Slovenia. It has more than 7.000 members. Volunteers are included in all aspects of it's operation, which means they have a lot of work and responsibility in the organization. The purpose of my graduation thesis was to research in what kind of condition are volunteers in scouts– how are they feeling, what is their motivation, are they feeling any stress, how devoted are unit leaders for care for volunteers, where would volunteers need more support, what are leader in the organization already good at and how do assistant leader trainers imagine the ideal in care for volunteers.
My research was qualitative, explorative and empiric. The sample was non-probable, I used quota and convenience sampling. I performed three focus groups with three different levels of of volunteers in scout organization – leaders, unit leaders and assistant leader trainers. Then I used qualitative analysis for analyzing the data.
I found out that volunteers in scouts are very different from one another in regards to tasks and experiences. It turned out that motivation for beginning and continuation with volunteering is different, that their motivation is commonly connected to the feeling of duty to the organization, that volunteers, especially those with less experience, really value support, that they do not always get, that they are pretty commonly under stress because of too much work for scouts and that communication between group leaders and unit leader is ineffective in many scout units and that most of the scouts feel a strong belonging to scouting. Of course not positive and not negative findings can not be generalized for every scout unit, because they are ccery different from each other.
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