Volunteering for All: national framework - literature review

Overview of the reviewed literature

Coverage of the review

We start by describing the coverage of the literature that was reviewed, describing the publication type; geographical coverage; and the overall quality scoring.

In total, 130 articles were full-text reviewed by multiple reviewers. After reading, 113 of them (87%) were assessed as appropriate for inclusion in the review and were fully evaluated. As shown in Table 1, the majority of the fully-evaluated papers primarily targeted an academic audience.

Table 1: Publication primary audience

The majority (95%) of the evaluated publications were empirical studies describing a single research study (see Table 2). As shown in Table 3, 28% of the evaluated publications were based on qualitative research design; and roughly 67% were quantitative studies (N=76), including 71 case-control/cross-sectional/uncontrolled longitudinal studies, two cohort studies, two economic evaluations and one ‘before and after’ study. 

Table 2: Publication type

Table 3: Research design

As shown in Table 4, 43% of the papers evaluated covered one or more countries outside of Europe.  A further 22% related to research conducted soley in England. Five publications (4%) were about research focussed exclusively on Scotland. In addition, there were another seven publications (6%) related to more than one country in the UK; and five of them used data from Scotland. There were also six publications that covered countries both within and outside of Europe. 

Table 4: Which country/countries the publications related to

Table 5 reports the distribution of the priority scores in the evaluated literature. Only eight publications scored four (out of seven priority domains); whereas the majority of publications scored two or three. 

Table 5: Priority scores

Regarding the quality of research, most of the publications reviewed were assessed as either high or medium quality. Only a small number of them were categorised as low quality publications (see Table 6). This quality assessment was taken into account in writing this review.

Table 6: Research quality evaluated by reviewers