Investigating predictors of medical students' intentions to engagement in volunteering during the health crisis

What is it about?

The purpose of the present paper is to investigate Algerian medical students' intention to participate in volunteer work during the COVID-19 pandemic.The authors adopted an extended theory of planned behavior (TPB) framework by integrating the constructs of personal moral norms and perceived risk of COVID‐19, and followed a self-administered questionnaire survey to collect data among a convenience sample of medical students (n = 267) in five Algerian universities. The data obtained were analyzed through a hierarchical multiple regression process in which three models were considered.

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Why is it important?

Findings show that attitude toward volunteering, perceived behavior control (PBC), personal moral norm, and subjective norm significantly and positively predicted medical students' intention to engage in volunteer work during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, students’ perceived risk of COVID‐19 significantly and negatively predicted their intention to participate in volunteer activities. Moreover, our analyses showed that the extended TPB model explained 75.1% of the variance of intention.The findings have implications for understanding medical students' volunteer behavior during health crises. Some implications are provided for the crisis and emergency managers of hospitals, and policymakers to attract and recruit enough medical students' volunteers for future waves of COVID‐19 or other similar health crises.

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