Volunteers: Reflexive Social Agents

Community participation is increasingly seen as a valuable addition to service provision. But we lack adequate understanding of what links individuals to community participation and how this influences community participation. In this chapter I outline a Reflexive Social Volunteer Agent model as an explanation of volunteering. The model uses a critical realist framework to incorporate the concepts of reflexive individuals, interests, agency and identities to understand volunteer involvement with health services. The model outlined will be useful for health services and policy makers that desire to generate or harness community participation for services.