Volunteer training: Increasing facilitative and reducing inappropriate action responding

Abstract

It is likely that volunteer helpers in many community health programs have an inappropriate action-oriented or advice-giving approach to helping. This orientation promotes contradictions between aims and practice when the former has to do with prevention and reduces the effectiveness of programs. This paper evaluates a training program designed to remove the ambiguity between helping role and service delivery in volunteers about to work with adolescents. This was done by training to increase the tendency to respond in facilitative and to decrease the tendency to respond in action-oriented ways. Changes in tendencies pre- to post-training using this different from usual approach suggest that it was highly successful.