Volunteerism across institutionalization, space and time: The Three-Dimensional Framework and a multilevel research agenda for community psychology

The present paper articulates a vision of community psychology of volunteerism drawing upon existing and developing research on volunteerism. It identifies the changing nature of volunteerism and the gap in research of a unifying framework of the different forms of volunteerism (e.g., online vs. offline, continuous vs. episodic, informal vs. formal). In doing so, the paper presents both traditional forms of in-presence volunteerism and the emerging new forms of volunteerism and builds upon their dimensions (i.e., institutional, spatial, and temporal) to gather the disparate and different forms of volunteerism into a unique integrated framework. The Three-Dimensional Framework is used to move on with a multilevel research agenda for community psychology to situate the variability of the new forms of volunteerism. Notably, the paper shows how the Three-Dimensional Framework can provide a thorough basis for understanding volunteerism in community psychology and enable community psychology to operate in modern communities and contexts of volunteerism, properly addressing their peculiarities. The paper concludes with new theoretical and practical implications for community psychologists.