Exploring the Structure of Volunteer Activities in Hospital Settings Using Multidimensional Scaling: A Preliminary Study

: As the Thai people have been more aware of the importance of volunteering, the structure of volunteer activities in the country’s hospitals has become more complicated. As a result, medical personnel and volunteer organizations have faced challenges in connecting people with the activities most relevant to concerns and needs. In order to assist the host parties as well as individual volunteers, a system that can match the personal characteristics of volunteers to the demands of the activities needs to be developed. As a starting point, multidimensional scaling was used in this study to reveal a working structure for volunteer activities by exploring major dimensions underlying the similarity and dissimilarity between these activities. Twenty-three volunteer activities proposed by a panel of experts and stakeholders were subject to an ordinal (non-metric) multidimensional scaling. All but one volunteer activity can be grouped along three dimensions: hospital-related, lecturing versus group leading , and empathic communication . These three dimensions can serve as a blueprint for identifying personal characteristics that may be essential to each activity and for designing a system for volunteer recruitment and placement.