Does volunteering impact refugee women's life satisfaction, empowerment, and wellbeing? Experimental evidence, local knowledge, and causal reasoning.

Background: There are gaps in the evidence base addressing whether volunteering programs enhance the wellbeing, empowerment, and life satisfaction of individual volunteers. Program impacts are seldom rigorously evaluated, whilst construct meanings remain largely unspecified, especially in the Middle East. This study tested the impacts of We Love Reading, a program training volunteers to read aloud in their local communities. It also mapped local knowledge representation.

Methods: We conducted a mixed-method program evaluation based on a randomized cluster trial with 105 Syrian refugee women from poor households in Amman, Jordan. At three time points (baseline, 5-month and 12-month-follow-up), we implemented a survey to measure levels of life satisfaction (Cantril), psychological empowerment (PE), and psychological wellbeing (PWB). We used regression models on panel data to estimate individual-level impacts, adjusting for women's characteristics and the moderating effects of their social networks. We also conducted net-mapping sessions to clarify local concepts and their causal connections, generating thematic analyses and fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) to represent local knowledge and causal influences.

Results: Life satisfaction was the only outcome variable showing a significant impact for We Love Reading (Cantril, β = 3.00, p = 0.002). Thematic analyses and FCMs made explicit the multi-dimensional aspects of lived experiences: emphasis was placed on reaching goals, having "the full right to act," the freedom to take decisions, willingness and determination. Women explained that building their empowerment and agency was a main driver of life satisfaction, and that volunteering boosted the resolve of "not giving up" on life goals.

Conclusion: This program evaluation integrates scientifically-rigorous and culturally-relevant methodologies to identify impacts, local knowledge systems, and causal pathways of influence. This helps clarify how and why volunteering works in real-life situations across cultural contexts, calling attention to what programs seek to achieve, how they avoid volunteer burden, and why they generate social change.