2016 Gatlinburg Conference Poster
PS-12
Title: Sustained Volunteering in Special Education Advocates
Authors: Samantha Goldman, Meghan Burke, Carrie Mason, Robert Hodapp
Introduction: For children with intellectual disabilities, their most important "everyday environment" involves their
neighborhood schools, particularly the special education services provided by those schools. Yet given the complexity of laws
such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), parents of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities
often require extra support in navigating special education law. The field of special education advocacy has emerged to meet
these needs, along with several models for training.
Currently, however, little is known about the types of advocacy activities in which special education advocates engage; how
much trainees advocate after completing such programs; and the correlates of sustained special education advocacy. In
addition, the differences between trainees who advocate after program completion and those who do not are not well
understood. Building from psychological studies of the functions of volunteering, as well as preliminary examinations of advocacy
in special education, this study asked four questions: (1) What do sustained volunteer special education advocacy activities look
like over time? (2) Do existing measures of volunteering apply to volunteer advocates? (3) Are greater amounts of advocacy
correlated with role identity, motivation, and satisfaction? and, (4) After completing the training, do differences exist between
graduates who volunteer as advocates compared to those who do not volunteer?
Methods: All participants were long-term graduates of the Volunteer Advocacy Program (VAP), a 12-week (36-hour) training
program provided each academic term over five years. To provide details of advocacy activities up to four years post-graduation,
83 VAP graduates completed a web-based survey. The final survey was separated into four sections: (a) demographic
information (age, gender, SES, education); (b) questions about advocacy activities since completing the training (number of
families helped; degree to which advocate engaged in 8 specific activities); (c) motivation for volunteering and satisfaction (using
the Volunteer Functions Inventory; Clary et al., 1998); and (d) information about the degree to which advocates considered being
special education advocates as central to their role identities (from Callero, 1985). Analyses included correlations for advocacy
rates, t-tests and chi-squares to compare advocates to non-advocates, and principal components analysis to understand the
relation among different types of advocacy activities.
Results: In 1-4 years after program graduation, 63.8% (53 of 83) of graduates advocated for one or more families; these
advocates reported stable rates of advocacy over time (last 6-month advocacy rate correlated with advocacy rate since VAP
graduation at r = .819, p < .0001), and performed activities that were either family-focused or school-focused (these two factors
accounted for 92% of the variance). For those (53) graduates who advocated post-training, amounts of advocacy were positively
related to involvement with the broader disability community, r = .435, p < .001, and with other advocates, r = .319, p = .02.
Compared to those not advocating after graduating, sustained advocates reported higher advocacy-role identities, increased
involvement in disability groups, and greater likelihood of advocating in the upcoming year (all t-test differences at p < .001;
effect sizes from d = 0.50 to 0.89).
Discussion: Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of role identity and the potential for advocacy training
programs to build such identity. These findings have important implications for future research, practice, and policy as we work
to train special education advocates to support families of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
References/Citations:
• Callero, P. L. (1985). Role identity salience. Social Psychology Quarterly, 48, 203-214.
• Clary, E. G., Snyder, M. S., Ridge, R. D., Copeland, J. Stukas, A. A., Haugen, J., & Miene, P. (1998). Understanding and
assessing the motivations of volunteers: A functional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6),
1516-1530.