Environmental Volunteering Projects Management: A Multivariate Analysis of Volunteers’ Perspective on the Knowledge and Skills Gained, Their Involvement in Community Life and the Role of Environmental Monitoring Sensors

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

 I read with interest your paper which attempts to investigate issues related to the benefits of volunteering in environmental issues. In general your study is of interest because we need research and data to develop and strengthen environmental knowledge and awareness in the context of informal and lifelong learning and of the community field. The field you have chosen is not particularly studied; nevertheless, there is a reference base.

 The main weaknesses I was able to identify in your research presentation are as follows:

- The theoretical part concerning the issue under investigation is weak. Perhaps this is because there is no clear field of expertise to form the basis and compass for the article. Is it placed in the field of environmental education, adult environmental education, psychology or sociology? Is it an interdisciplinary field regarding volunteering? The fact that there is no in-depth presentation and theoretical support I think also creates problems both in the formulation of the research hypotheses and in the presentation of the results and the discussion.

 

- How did you choose the configuration of the specific variables? You merge knowledge, skills and attitudes without really being the same thing. Also the concept of "traits" I'm not sure is testable, unless it exists in the relevant literature.

- Keywords and terms such as citizen science, pollution, climate change are used, but a very superficial reference is made to them. I would use a more general concept like environmental problems or environmental crisis.

- More generally, the environmental issue, although it is present in the title, in the keywords and the design of the research, does not play an essential role, but the background on which the benefits of volunteering are studied more. That is, if the volunteering took place in another field, e.g. in human rights, would the results be different relative to the benefits of the participants? Do the environment and sustainability play a role in your research?

- The way the results are presented is not very understandable for a reader who is not very familiar with statistics. A very short description of the individual results that are friendlier to the average reader is also needed.

- Finally, the conclusions need more focus on the summary and contribution of the specific research findings. Focusing on general proposals and directions does not help the contribution of the specific research to emerge.

I think that it is a very good and useful choice of a research field that needs deeper documentation and highlighting for a substantial contribution to the field to emerge.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your observations and for the opportunity to improve our manuscript!

We are very grateful for taking the time to analyze the paper and make very useful, encouraging and thoughtful comments and recommendations.

We have read the evaluation and, based on the review reports, we performed revisions of our manuscript, as requested, highlighted with red into the manuscript.

 

1. The theoretical part concerning the issue under investigation is weak. Perhaps this is because there is no clear field of expertise to form the basis and compass for the article. Is it placed in the field of environmental education, adult environmental education, psychology or sociology? Is it an interdisciplinary field regarding volunteering?

 

Response: Thank you for your observation. We added an explanation in the introduction stating that our research is focused on environmental education and volunteering projects between higher education institutions and multinationals companies which create important benefits for the participants, mostly students, thus helping them in their future careers with the knowledge, skills and attitudes gained within these projects.

 

We also added more references in the theoretical part, in the Literature review section to better explain the variables we considered for our research, from a theoretical point of view.

 

The newly added references are:

Coetzer, A. and Sitlington, H. What knowledge, skills and attitudes should strategic HRM students acquire? A Delphi study. Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources 2014, 52(2), pp.155-172.

Sedyastuti, K., Suwarni, E., Rahadi, D.R. and Handayani, M.A., 2021, April. Human Resources Competency at Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises in Palembang Songket Industry. In 2nd Annual Conference on Social Science and Humanities (ANCOSH 2020) (pp. 248-251). Atlantis Press.

Mauro, L. Attitudes and Skills in Business Working Settings: A HR Management Tool. Business and Economics Journal 2017, 8(291). https://doi.org/10.4172/2151-6219.1000291

Lounsbury, J.W., Steel, R.P., Gibson, L.W. and Drost, A.W. Personality traits and career satisfaction of human resource pro-fessionals. Human Resource Development International 2008, 11(4), pp.351-366.

Eagly, A.H. and Chaiken, S. The psychology of attitudes. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993.

Velea, L.; Udriștioiu, M.T.; Puiu, S.; Motișan, R.; Amarie, D. A Community-Based Sensor Network for Monitoring the Air Quality in Urban Romania. Atmosphere 2023, 14, 840. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos14050840

 

2. How did you choose the configuration of the specific variables? You merge knowledge, skills and attitudes without really being the same thing. Also the concept of "traits" I'm not sure is testable, unless it exists in the relevant literature.

 

Response: Because the other reviewer also asked us to provide more explanations regarding the variables in the literature review section, we included these details there.

Thus, we explained the reason behind our choice to analyze knowledge, skills and attitudes under the same variable. A reference for the importance of traits for selection of candidates for a job from the HR perspective was also provided. The following explanation was included in the text:

 

The decision to group knowledge, skills and attitudes under the same variable was based on the research on the competencies looked up by people working in HR [7-10]. We do not treat them separately because we want to better understand the benefits gained by volunteers which might help them in finding a better job. They are treated by HR in combination and we kept this perspective, this being only the first aspect we study in our research. The knowledge refers to the information acquired by volunteers, the skills to what they can do practically and the attitudes refer to ‘a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor’ [11] (p. 1).

 

For the second variable, we added: We appreciate that this variable is important, being a predictor of how societies evolve in the context of the emergency posed by climate change nowadays. Each individual is responsible for his actions and this variable focuses on the way volunteering projects can lead to a higher level of awareness and a higher degree of involvement.

 

For the third variable, we added: We chose this variable because volunteers have an important role in developing sensor networks that can monitor the quality of the air [23] and this behaviour can be developed through environmental volunteering projects. We also added the references related to the importance of citizen science here: The concept of “citizen science” is present in many works [27-31] that emphasize the need to have more engaged volunteers that can help with monitoring the quality of the air we breathe.

 

3. Keywords and terms such as citizen science, pollution, climate change are used, but a very superficial reference is made to them. I would use a more general concept like environmental problems or environmental crisis.

 

Response: We added the references related to citizen science in relation to air quality monitoring in the literature review section. We kept the keyword citizen science because is strongly linked with the third variable but we added environmental problems too, as you suggested. The references were in the Discussion section but we added them in the literature review section too. The references are:

 

Catlin-Groves, C.L. (2012). The citizen science landscape: from volunteers to citizen sensors and beyond. International Journal of Zoology, Article ID 349630. https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/349630.

Goodchild, M.F. (2007). Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal, 69, 211–221. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-007-9111-y

Languille, B., Gros, V., Bonnaire, N., Pommier, C., Honoré, C., Debert, C., ... and Zeitouni, K. (2020). A methodology for the characterization of portable sensors for air quality measure with the goal of deployment in citizen science. Science of the Total Environment, 708, 134698. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.134698

Hsu, Y.C., Dille, P., Cross, J., Dias, B., Sargent, R. and Nourbakhsh, I. (2017, May). Community-empowered air quality mon-itoring system. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on human factors in computing systems, pp. 1607-1619.

Mahajan, S., Kumar, P., Pinto, J. A., Riccetti, A., Schaaf, K., Camprodon, G., ... and Forino, G. (2020). A citizen science approach for enhancing public understanding of air pollution. Sustainable Cities and Society, 52, 101800. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2019.101800

 

4. More generally, the environmental issue, although it is present in the title, in the keywords and the design of the research, does not play an essential role, but the background on which the benefits of volunteering are studied more. That is, if the volunteering took place in another field, e.g. in human rights, would the results be different relative to the benefits of the participants? Do the environment and sustainability play a role in your research?

 

Response: As you well highlighted in Point 1 and also here, we added a paragraph in the introduction regarding the field where our research can be included and this is related to environmental education. We added the following explanation:  We started our research considering our experience with environmental education and the volunteering projects developed by higher education institutions in partnership with multinational companies. These projects can help volunteers in gaining knowledge, skills and attitudes that are so helpful in their careers. 

 

We do not know if the benefits are different or not, but we were interested in the environmental dimension of volunteering and the citizen science behind developing sensor networks with the help of volunteers (the second and the third variable).

So, even if knowledge, skills and attitudes gained in volunteering projects might be similar no matter if it is related to environment or human rights, our research introduced specific variables (the second and the third) which are specific to the environmental component.

 

5. The way the results are presented is not very understandable for a reader who is not very familiar with statistics. A very short description of the individual results that are friendlier to the average reader is also needed.

 

Response: Indeed, we are aware that Results are more statistical and we cannot delete or rephrase this part because there are mandatory steps that should be followed when using SmartPLS method. Thus, we decided to include a Discussion section, separately, after the Results, to better explain the results.

 

We have these explanations in a friendlier way in Discussion, section 5 but we added more explanations in Conclusions as you suggest at the following point.

 

Thus, you can find in the text the following explanations for each hypothesis we tested.

 

H1: The individual knowledge, skills, traits and attitudes gained by volunteers in environmental volunteering projects have a direct and positive impact on the involvement in community life and the general level of awareness towards environmental issues. This hypothesis was validated which shows that volunteers perceive the benefits they gain from volunteering projects focused on protecting the environment and appreciate them as having an important impact on their involvement in the community but also the general level of education and awareness in the society on the topic of environment, pollution, climate change and so on.

 

H2: The individual knowledge, skills, traits and attitudes gained by volunteers in environmental volunteering projects have a direct and positive impact on their perception regarding the role of environmental monitoring sensors. This hypothesis was validated which shows that volunteers in these projects understand the important role played by sensors monitoring the quality of the environment we all live in. This happens because volunteers gain more knowledge on environmental issues, are more informed, develop critical thinking and thus better understand the sensors’ usefulness. This hypothesis is important because it can lead to citizen initiatives and the development of new sensors in local communities that are not otherwise covered.

 

H3: The involvement in community life and the general level of awareness towards environmental issues have a direct and positive impact on the volunteers’ perception regarding the role of environmental monitoring sensors. This hypothesis was validated which indicates that people that are more involved in community life, and more knowledgeable about environmental issues are also the ones that appreciate the role of sensors in providing accurate data regarding environmental quality.

 

 

6. The conclusions need more focus on the summary and contribution of the specific research findings. Focusing on general proposals and directions does not help the contribution of the specific research to emerge.

 

Response: Thank you for your suggestion. We included a paragraph with the summary of our findings in the conclusion section and also better highlighted our contribution.

The following text was added: Our findings show that the knowledge, skills and attitudes gained by volunteers in environmental projects have an important impact on their involvement in community life and their perception regarding the importance of sensors in monitoring air quality. Our contribution is important considering the role played by environmental education in raising awareness towards problems like climate change.

 

We also have a paragraph related to future research directions which might help with the emergence of new research: As future research directions, we consider introducing new variables important. Among these, we can mention variables such as the interest in entrepreneurship among volunteers in environmental projects or the pollution level of the region. The first variable might show that volunteers interested in business are more prone to engage in activities related to developing sensor networks. The second one can influence how a region’s citizens perceive environmental issues.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper is interesting in some respect. The research seems to be designed to “prove” the merit of voluntary contributing work, both for society and individuals themselves.

It appears to the reviewer that the ideological foundation is weak. Particularly how the variable are constructed and presented, e.g. there is no distinction between knowledge and skills. Also, the methodological approach of selecting data is weakly presented.

Overall, there does not seem to be much new knowledge contribution presented. Also, the limitations should be discussed in better context with the limited method of collecting data.

Below are some point and comments to give the authors better view of the reviewer’s results.

 

Introduction:

line 74: instead of “in special” it is suggested to use “in particular”.

Line 77: after the word “knowledge” put comma

 

section 2.1 (lines 84 onward).

Knowledge skills! These are two components. One is knowledge, other is skills. (you separate these in line 95!).

Later, in discussions, you treat these as two components. It is strongly suggested that authors reconsider the name “knowledge skills” and explain better what they really mean.

 

Literature review:

The literature review for each variable is not very helpful. It is not clear how you comprise each variable, e.g. it is unclear how you treat the difference of knowledge versus skills.

 

Make a short summary of each variable in the literature review, for the reader to understand in a nutshell what each variable is to stand for (measure)!

Help the reader to understand how you built up items to measure each variable. Your literature review is not clear on that.

 

Method:

The data collection method is questionable. You use social media (Facebook) asking for voluntary answers – most likely coming from people who either share your views (of voluntary work and protecting the nature are important) or agree with that.

This is insufficiently mentioned in lines 343 and 344. You indicate that there are only two options: Facebook or face-to-face version (that is indicating lack of methodology knowledge in research design!)

 

Line 200: In reviewer’s view you did not use “questions”. These are STATEMENTS the participants responded to on a Likert-scale.

 

What is the argument (defence) of using social media like Facebook? How reliable source of information its that?

How do you solve the issue of getting a reliable sample of the population you wanted to get? How do you treat possible bias in your data? These must be answered (at least discussed and acknoledged).

 

When discussing the hypothesis (H1, H2 and H3) in discussions, you state, e.g. for H3 that “the general level of awareness towards environmental issues have a direct and positive impact on the volunteers’ perception regarding the role of environmental monitoring sensors”.

This is a strong statement having in mind the weakness of your data collection method.

Then, in line 306, you state these results SHOW that … Try to be humbler and say that these results INDICATE .... You have a quite weak scientific data collection method, and therefore these results can only indicate what you state!

 

Line 339 Your results INDICATE. And, you do not mention knowledge here (only skills).

 

Reference list:

Revisit the references and make sure they are up to the journal requirements and standards.

Some examples:

All italics are missing (in book names, journal names etc.)

Reference 23 and 26: Volume and issue is wrongly presented.

Reference 32: give correct information of the article (don’t use “article”)

Reference 40:  Make sure you do not have (), and then “vol”. Redo this reference.

 

. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your observations and for the opportunity to improve our manuscript!

We are very grateful for taking the time to analyze the paper and make very useful, encouraging and thoughtful comments and recommendations.

We have read the evaluation and, based on the review reports, we performed revisions of our manuscript, as requested, highlighted with red into the manuscript.

 

1. Introduction:

line 74: instead of “in special” it is suggested to use “in particular”.

Line 77: after the word “knowledge” put comma

 

Response: Thank you for your suggestions. We made the changes in the text. We also corrected the problem with the comma after the word knowledge in the entire paper. We missed that in the translation process.

 

2. section 2.1 (lines 84 onward).

Knowledge skills! These are two components. One is knowledge, other is skills. (you separate these in line 95!).

Later, in discussions, you treat these as two components. It is strongly suggested that authors reconsider the name “knowledge skills” and explain better what they really mean.

 

Response: As we said in the previous response, thank you again for noticing the lack of the comma which in this case is very important because knowledge and skills are different and were treated differently. As we said, it was a mistake during the translation and probably the comma between knowledge and skills was deleted. We made the corrections in the entire paper.

 

 

3. Literature review:

The literature review for each variable is not very helpful. It is not clear how you comprise each variable, e.g. it is unclear how you treat the difference of knowledge versus skills. Make a short summary of each variable in the literature review, for the reader to understand in a nutshell what each variable is to stand for. Help the reader to understand how you built up items to measure each variable.

 

Response: Thank you for your recommendations. We added more explanations and references in the Literature review to better explain the variables we chose for our research. We better explained our reason behind specifically choosing these variables.

The newly added references in the literature review in relation to our variables are:

 

Coetzer, A. and Sitlington, H. What knowledge, skills and attitudes should strategic HRM students acquire? A Delphi study. Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources 2014, 52(2), pp.155-172.

 

Sedyastuti, K., Suwarni, E., Rahadi, D.R. and Handayani, M.A. Human Resources Competency at Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises in Palembang Songket Industry. In 2nd Annual Conference on Social Science and Humanities (ANCOSH 2020), virtual conference, 28 November 2020

 

Mauro, L. Attitudes and Skills in Business Working Settings: A HR Management Tool. Business and Economics Journal 2017, 8(1), pp. 1-4.

 

Lounsbury, J.W., Steel, R.P., Gibson, L.W. and Drost, A.W. Personality traits and career satisfaction of human resource professionals. Human Resource Development International 2008, 11(4), pp.351-366.

Eagly, A.H. and Chaiken, S. The psychology of attitudes. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: New York, USA, 1993.

 

Velea, L.; Udriștioiu, M.T.; Puiu, S.; Motișan, R.; Amarie, D. A Community-Based Sensor Network for Monitoring the Air Quality in Urban Romania. Atmosphere 2023, 14, 840. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos14050840

 

 

4. Method:

The data collection method is questionable. You use social media (Facebook) asking for voluntary answers – most likely coming from people who either share your views (of voluntary work and protecting the nature are important) or agree with that.

This is insufficiently mentioned in lines 343 and 344.

 

Line 200: In reviewer’s view you did not use “questions”. These are STATEMENTS the participants responded to on a Likert-scale.

 

What is the argument of using social media like Facebook? How reliable source of information its that?

How do you solve the issue of getting a reliable sample of the population you wanted to get? How do you treat possible bias in your data? These must be answered (at least discussed and acknowledged).

 

Response:

 

1. Thank you for your suggestions. We added a paragraph in the Method section to explain why we chose Facebook. We understand that it is not the perfect channel, but for the time of our survey and for our country, this channel increased the chances of having diversity among respondents. Thus, we added in the text: We chose this method of collecting data because volunteers in environmental projects are usually youngsters enrolled at a higher education institution. In Romania, Facebook is one of the most used social media platforms. Also, the bias was eliminated because we disseminated the survey to Facebook groups where there are users from the entire country and with different interests. Another reason for using Facebook is that most higher education institutions in Romania had online courses in winter and early spring to make energy savings.

 

We also want to emphasize that we do not know if the respondents share our views because they were not our friends, we distributed the survey in various groups. We did not interact personally with them and did not collect any personal data.

 

1. We also changed the word questions with statements as you suggested.

 

1. As you also suggested, we acknowledged and extended the paragraph with limitations in Conclusions. We added this paragraph: One of the limitations is related to the use of Facebook for disseminating the questionnaire, which in Romania is a preferred social media channel, especially among youngsters who are usually involved in volunteering projects. We reduced the bias and tried to raise the reliability of our data by sending the survey to many Facebook groups targeting respondents with different backgrounds. We do not know which Facebook users responded and we did not collect any personal data.

 

 

5. When discussing the hypothesis (H1, H2 and H3) in discussions, you state, e.g. for H3 that “the general level of awareness towards environmental issues have a direct and positive impact on the volunteers’ perception regarding the role of environmental monitoring sensors”.

This is a strong statement having in mind the weakness of your data collection method.

Then, in line 306, you state these results SHOW that … Try to be humbler and say that these results INDICATE .... You have a quite weak scientific data collection method, and therefore these results can only indicate what you state!

 

Line 339 Your results INDICATE. And, you do not mention knowledge here (only skills).

 

Response: We made the changes and used indicate instead of show, see lines 336 and 369 in the present version of the manuscript.

 

6. Reference list:

Revisit the references and make sure they are up to the journal requirements and standards.

Some examples:

All italics are missing (in book names, journal names etc.)

Reference 23 and 26: Volume and issue is wrongly presented.

Reference 32: give correct information of the article (don’t use “article”)

Reference 40:  Make sure you do not have (), and then “vol”. Redo this reference.

 

Response: We checked the guidelines and formatted the reference list. Thank you for noticing this issue. We highly appreciate your help in making our paper better.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have worked on the suggestions and the revised manuscript is improved. The majority of comments have been answered, although perhaps this has happened too quickly. Perhaps some questions were deeper and needed deeper processing.

Regarding the presentation of the results, I still believe that it would be more helpful if there was a greater explanation and interpretation of the data in this section. It would be friendlier and more helpful to the reader. But I will not insist, since the authors have justified their answer.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your observations and for the opportunity to improve our manuscript!

We are very grateful for taking the time to analyze the paper and make very useful, encouraging and thoughtful comments and recommendations.

Comment 1: The authors have worked on the suggestions and the revised manuscript is improved. The majority of comments have been answered, although perhaps this has happened too quickly. Perhaps some questions were deeper and needed deeper processing.

Regarding the presentation of the results, I still believe that it would be more helpful if there was a greater explanation and interpretation of the data in this section. It would be friendlier and more helpful to the reader. But I will not insist, since the authors have justified their answer.

Response: We assure you that all your comments were appreciated and addressed carefully by me and my co-author. We worked as a team, thus being able to provide the responses in a timely manner.

Regarding the results, we provided a friendlier explanation in the section Discussion. We appreciate its importance for the reason you mentioned: to express results in a friendlier way for the reader.

Thank you for your understanding, and the time and effort needed to review our paper that helped us to improve our manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report

Some attempt has been made to explain the methodological issues. The reset is ok.

The reference list MUST be corrected better. Look at the instructions. For example the Volume of a Journal should be italic.

.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your observations and for the opportunity to improve our manuscript!

We are very grateful for taking the time to analyze the paper and make very useful, encouraging and thoughtful comments and recommendations.

 

Comment: The reference list MUST be corrected better. Look at the instructions. For example, the Volume of a Journal should be in italics.

Response: Thank you for giving us the opportunity to improve our paper. The references were corrected now and the volume is in italics. Thank you again for your time and effort in helping us improve our paper.