An interpretive qualitative approach insists on the plural and negotiated nature of the meanings that humans attach to their social realities. Thus, the qualitative researcher must navigate multiple and sometimes conflicting commitments to method, data, oneself, participants, and one’s reader. This can lead us to obscure the messiness of data analysis in final research reports and to downplay how methodological choices can make our participants ‘say things.’ In this article, we compare two interpretive methods, thematic and narrative analysis, including their shared epistemological and ontological premises, and offer a pedagogical demonstration of their application to the same data excerpt. However, our broader goal is to use the divergent results to critically examine how our choice of analytic method in interpretive research influences how we (researcher + method) ‘author’ data stories. Ultimately, researcher reflexivity must go beyond acknowledging how one’s position may influence the data analysis or the participant.

Despite the practical need to cultivate individuals’ engagement with nonprofit organizations and theoretical interest in volunteerism across multiple disciplines and perspectives, the conceptual boundaries of volunteering remain vague. Although definitions from the literature emphasize free will, lack of financial gain, and benefit to others, they do not consider how volunteers might integrate, negotiate, or reject these meanings when the demands of freedom and contribution collide. This study adopts a hybrid phenomenological perspective to explore what organizational volunteering meant to volunteers themselves. The findings show that the meanings that participants gave to volunteering were both agentic and relational and that volunteers negotiated agency and relationality in a dynamic way. The article discusses the theoretical implications for how researchers define organizational volunteering and the meaning of work in nonstandard work environments, as well as the practical implications for volunteer management.

This article employs a boundary work framework to analyze how volunteers from two nonprofit human services organizations navigated the tensions between volunteerism and professionalism. Based on interview data and analysis of organizational documents, the study found that volunteers at the first organization, fundraisers for child health promotion and parent education, dichotomized volunteerism and professionalism as incompatible social systems with divergent objectives, practices, and tools. Volunteers at the second organization, which provides emergency ambulance services, engaged in constant boundary crossing, oscillating between a volunteer and professional approach to tasks and relationships depending on the context. In both cases, paid staff and members of the public affected participants’ ability to engage in boundary work. The study offers insights for nonprofit organizations wishing to professionalize their volunteer workforce by specifying how volunteer job types, organizational structure, and interactional partners’ feedback impact volunteers’ ability to engage in boundary crossing, passing, and boundary spanning.

As members of local host communities, volunteers play an important role in effective long-term refugee resettlement. This study investigated the nature of volunteer commitment by organizational volunteers who were assigned a front-line role in organizing material assistance and providing information about cultural practices for newly arrived refugees. Using interview data from volunteers, organizational representatives, and organizational recruitment and training documents, the study found that volunteers’ commitment was structured by the presence and absence of volunteer coordinators, the organization’s clients and volunteers’ significant others. While insufficient ties to the organization or strong, competing ties from significant others led volunteers to detach themselves from the organization, overly strong affective ties with refugees displaced organizational ties, leading to volunteers’ organizational exit. This study problematizes an individual-centric, psychological notion of commitment; instead, it situates commitment as a collective communicative process whereby relevant stakeholders negotiate the relationships that tie them together. It thus expands the range of voices present in decisions about commitment and provides new data on how organizational and relational others impact sustainable volunteer management.

Despite initial enthusiasm about the potential of voluntourism to promote sustainable development and intercultural learning, recent critiques have focused on voluntourists’ tendency to reinforce status differences by “Othering” their hosts. This study expands the literature on Othering in international voluntourism contexts by examining how local community members who interacted with voluntourists interpreted the Self–Other relationship. Based on longitudinal focus group data from four host communities, the findings showed that the categories of “Self” and “Other” were not fixed but fluid, permeable, and dynamic. The study suggests that the Othering process can open up unexpected relational spaces and reconfigure community–voluntourist relationships.

As unpaid family caregiving of older adults becomes increasingly prevalent, it is imperative to understand how family caregivers are socialized and how they understand the caregiving role. This PRISMA-ScR-based scoping review examines the published literature between 1995–2019 on the socialization of potential and current unpaid family caregivers of older adults. Of 4,599 publications identified, 47 were included. Three perspectives of socialization were identified: (1) role acculturation ; (2) role negotiation and identification ; and (3) specialized role learning . The findings show how socialization involves different contexts (e.g., cultures), imperatives for action (e.g., circumstances), socialization agents (e.g., family), processes (e.g., modeling), and internal (e.g., normalization) and external (e.g., identification) consequences for caregivers. Future research could fruitfully explore how caregivers manage key turning points within the socialization process, disengage from the caregiving role, and negotiate the socialization and individualization processes within diverse cultural and funding contexts.