- Kalina Gajda
- Meanings of Abroad Volunteer Tourism: From the Perspective of Students
- International Studies
Describe
your research
experience
My research aims at elaborating the meanings of abroad volunteer tourism described by college students. The main research questions focus on why students are increasingly participating in abroad voluntourism programs as well as the meanings of such experiences to the participants regarding their personal growth, academics and career goals.
Voluntourism is defined as “volunteering in an organized way to undertake holidays that might involve aiding or alleviating the material poverty of some groups in society” (Wearing, 2001, p. 1; Andereck et. al, 2012). These programs especially appeal to young adults who are continuing their higher education, as abroad voluntourism programs are typically short-term trips and often occur over spring, winter or summer breaks. Most volunteer tourism programs send residents from the Global North to developing countries in the Global South (Pastran, 2014). I utilized the phenomenological approach to design the research, as well as to collect and to analyze the data. I conducted 16 in-depth interviews with undergraduate students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who had abroad volunteer tourism experiences in the last one year. The results of data analysis reveal that college students regard the abroad volunteer tourism experiences as an eye-opening experience with givings and gainings, and mixed emotions during the process. In addition, such experiences are transformative that play important role in affecting their future decisions on personal growth, career, etc.
As one of the recipient's of OUR's Research Support Grant (2017), the results of Kalina's research can be found here.
