Parantal Voluntary Engagement in Grassroots Sports Clubs

Abstract

Introduction: Grassroots sport clubs in Switzerland depend heavily on volunteers but face persistent recruitment challenges. Parents constitute a crucial yet time-limited volunteer pool linked to their children’s participation (Trussell, 2016). This study examines which individual and organizational factors predict parents’ entry into volunteering in sports clubs.

Methods: Using survey data from the Swiss Football Association’s “Quality Club” program, we analyzed 2,913 parents nested in 64 sport clubs from the German- and French-speaking regions of Switzerland. Parental voluntary engagement (PVE) was modeled as a binary outcome in multilevel analyses with Level-1 (individual) and Level-2 (club) predictors. Level-1 variables were centered within clusters; Level-2 variables were grand-mean centered. Single imputation using predictive mean matching addressed missing data. A null model indicated that 12% of variance in PVE lay between clubs (ICC).

Results: At the individual level, being a father (β = 0.14, p < .001), being personally active in a club sport (β = 0.17, p < .001), stronger club-related community interest (helping with club tasks, taking part in decision processes) (β = 0.10, p < .001), higher education (β = 0.05, p < .001), slightly older age (β = 0.004, p < .001), and social-emotional attachment (feeling proud, connected, comfortable; attending events; discussing club matters; β = 0.02, p = .04) predicted higher PVE; income, workload, and satisfaction with club work were non-significant. At the organizational level, large membership clubs (in terms of member size) showed lower PVE (β = −0.0003, p = .01). Language-region differences also emerged: overall PVE was lower in German- than in French-speaking clubs, and the association between club-related community interest and PVE was stronger in German-speaking clubs (cross-level interaction β = 0.03, p = .04). The final model yielded marginal R² around .15, indicating meaningful explanatory power of fixed effects.

Discussion and Conclusion: The results showed that both membership-related and club-related factors are important predictors of PVE, consequently, parental volunteer management is to be considered as a cross-level task. The significant factors identified at level 1 and 2 provide indications for effectively recruiting and retaining parents. In doing so, effective parental engagement promotes establishing a intergenerational volunteer culture in grassroots sport clubs (Frenger et al., 2019) and, in turn, mitigates recruitment difficulties.

References

Frenger, M., Emrich, E. & Pierdzioch., P. (2019). Vererbtes Ehrenamt? Überlegungen zur Heredität ehrenamtlichen Engagements in Sportvereinen. In J. Königstorfer (Hrsg.), Innovationsökonomie und -management im Sport (S. 207-221). Hofmann.

Trussell, D. E. (2016). Young people's perspectives of parent volunteerism in community youth sport. Sport Management Review, 19(3), 332-342. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smr.2015.09.001