Dave: It needed to be done

2.9.1 Context of Interview

Dave was a somewhat overweight 80 year old White man. The interview was conducted in a sort of nursing home where he was recuperating his leg after having had an operation, and as such he was lying in a hospital bed with his knee in a heavy brace. It was difficult to arrange the interview because his physical therapist’s schedule was variable. People came in and out of the room, including an elderly roommate and a friend who came to visit. As such the interview started late because of his therapy and ended earlier than planned

because of the friend.

2.9.2 Facts of Narrative

Dave grew up on a farm east of town. His parents were Christian and along with the community helped out their local minister. Many relatives such as cousins still lived in the area, and he himself was still living on the family farm. Even though he described himself as retired, it was clear that he also still did some work on the farm.

Even though Dave talked about working on the farm, his career had been in aviation. He had been an instructor at an aviation institute, and proudly counted an astronaut amongst his students. He had not been involved with any sort of formal volunteering or social advocacy while at the aviation institute, according to him simply because he did not have the time or opportunity.

Since retiring 24 years ago at the age of 56, Dave has remained active. He volunteers delivering affordable meals to the elderly and disabled. His father-in-law also used to participate in a similar program. Besides volunteering, he also audits course at the nearby university on topics such as biofuels. He has started planting crops such as miscanthus on part of his farm to learn more about that crop and how it can be converted to fuel.

2.9.3 Interpretation

Farm Folk

When asked about why what appealed to him about volunteering, Dave gave a few different answers. He did not dwell on them, and they seemed off the cuff but honest. He gave his mother’s condition in the last years of her life as one reason, his fath-in-law’s volunteering as another, but most of he just credited the values his parents had espoused.

Dave: I think probably one of the things that gave me the impetus, was uh, my mother had utilized uh the uh, meals on wheels uh when she got to the point when she couldn’t make her own meal. And I would um, have it delivered to my home, here in town, and then take it out to the farm and give it to her. So uh when she passed away, I thought, well, it would be nice to, to give a payback to society, so I’ve been doing it ever since. Now why? It could be that maybe some of the things that she and dad instilled in us kids, uh, when we were in the formative years, you know, try, try to help as many people as you can and make the world a better place than it was when you came in. That type of thing.

Interviewer: Now, did you, when you came to that decision, did you feel like you had to do it, or was it just like, hey, I have to do something and why not that?

Dave: That’s a good question. I suppose, uh, I had to do it because it was ingrained in me.

Um, like uh, if you see somebody getting hurt, well, you go try to help them. Um, I guess that’s, that’s the reason, uh, can’t think of a better reason.

Interviewer: No, yeah, well you did say, um, your parents kind of instilled those values, um, did they do anything? I mean obviously most parents are gonna say, you know, this is what you should do, but um, were they involved in either, I don’t know, charity work, but not necessarily even that formal, just, is there any instance you can remember that they did or that indicated that those were the values they had?

Dave: Well, it, it probably isn’t a good example because uh, farm folk are expected to take care, for example the minister, uh the ministers weren’t paid an awful lot back in those days, and uh, you were expected to give the preacher a ham, or when the uh, garden was in production, uh give them a few dozen uh sweet corn, uh, things like that. Maybe that’s what it was, I don’t know. It was probably so um subtle that I don’t even know why I did it, you just, you just do it.

“I don’t even know why I did it, you just do it.” It’s not that Dave has no insight into his volunteer-ing, rather it is clear that much of Dave’s world perspective is based on fairly straightforward values and implementing them. “Farm folk are expected to take.” This statement reveals a lot about Dave. At once it reveals that he still identifies strongly as ‘farm folk’, what values he sees that group as caring for, and in the context, that he wants to meet that expectation. Later in the interview, he talked about not being able to volunteer at the moment. “ But I suspect when I, when my legs get to the point when I can now drive a car, uh, I’ll probably go back to it. It’s just, you know, a way of life. ” Beyond any sense of obligation in an emotional sense, it seems that for Dave, this is just something that you do. One could see it as behavioral emulation, as Dave freely admits that his father-in-law influenced his decision to deliver meals. Talking about his father-in-law Dave said: “ He’d deliver the meals, and help, you know, dish them out and put them in the little cartons and then, uh, deliver them. And he would do it everyday. And uh, I guess that maybe that was a subtle hint that I should do something like that too. ” Dave followed this with a hearty laugh, an indication for his affection for the father-in-law but also I think seeing himself as part of a chain of people like him that did things like this.

Need and Old Age

Growing up in the area, Dave knew a great many people in the community, including several people that he had delivered meals to. Dave did not seem to see this as a reason to do it or a benefit. He said he did not have much of an opportunity to chat with anyone, largely because time did not allow it.

Dave did certainly enjoy seeing people he knew, but for him it was a natural occurrence. He also knew the families of several of the nurses where he was. He compared it to “that thing on Facebook,” (where)

“you list all your contacts and then you can pick from somebody else and next thing you know uh, you’re bound to come across people like that.” While Dave saw meeting people and people he knew as routine, it did seem that for him connecting with society mattered, he felt needed.

Dave: for instance there’s one fellow that used to be a uh, he, he handled paperwork for people who would buy cars and title, and a title and a license uh guy, I’ve known him for a long time.

His brother, I guess, was uh, owned and operated a filtering station in Urbana that I went to an awful lot when I was a kid, uh, but it’s just something extra, I think, uh, the fact that I didn’t know them, uh doesn’t really matter. Uh, as you can imagine, a lot, if not most of our clients are in the, in the uh lower income bracket and uh, some of the places we go to in the daytime, I don’t think I’d want to go there at night, particularly on Lierman Avenue there in Urbana, some places in Champaign, uh, uh, and in Urbana, but, you know, it’s something you’ve got to do and uh, we don’t deliver Meals on Wheels at night and I don’t suppose we ever will do it. It’s one of those things. But um, it’s just, you know, I feel, someday I’m going to get old and I’d like to think somebody would deliver a meal to me. I guess us men don’t have to worry because we’re usually the first ones to go and it’s our wives that uh, in fact most of the uh clients that uh, that we take are, that I carry meals to are, you know, are the ladies.

Int: Um, so what keeps you doing it?

Dave: Oh the fact that, uh that it needs to be done. I don’t know how many total there are each day, but there’s eight different routes and uh there’s probably at least a dozen on, on each route that has to be done. Uh, some of the people have been working with it for quite a long time, some were uh, you know, clients ten years ago. Uh, it was, it was nice to see how the progressed and uh it’s nice, you know, I’ve got the uh, where with I don’t have to work, course the taxpayers are paying my salary, so I figure maybe that’s another reason and I don’t know. A lot of people don’t do that though, they say well I’m just gonna lay here and collect my tax money, what the heck?

When Dave says “another reason,” he was referring to the reasons he had to volunteer. Dave could not give one answer. All of his answers seemed to relate back to just being the right thing to do, either because of being farm folk, what the government gives him, what his father-in-law used to do, or that someone might help him in the future. The common thread in these is a certain view Dave seems to hold of society. He never puts forward an explicit theory of how society works. He never seemed concerned either though, often laughing as he spoke and focusing much more on the details of the work. It seemed that Dave just saw things as given. It was a given that people helped each other, that everyone benefitted from everyone else.

Wind Farms and Miscanthus

A great deal of the interview with Dave amounted to discussing things that he was learning in his coursework on BioEnergy. He also asked about my voice recorder, told about doing recordings at his church, and fuel prices over the past fifty years in various countries.

Dave was an 80 year old man lying in a hospital bed next to a wheelchair, with nurses waiting on him, and was talking about planting miscanthus on his farm, because it was the only crop in the BioEnergy class he thought he could cultivate. He talked about getting old in the future tense, and generally expected to return to driving and volunteering within 3 months of not being able to walk unassisted.

I tried a few times to ask indirectly about his apparent optimism towards life. A question about whether the little things like increasing use of ethanol was met with a listing of numerous other crops that would also work as biofuel, and recommendations where I could learn more. When I replied by asking more about his optimism about the health of the world overall, he replied by talking about windmills about an hour’s drive away.

I asked what he would do if he couldn’t deliver meals, maybe if the program closed, and his reaction focused on how people would be hurt if the program ended. When I asked about whether he could not deliver, and he said he’d like to go camping.

Dave’s answers withheld an overall optimism, that helping was a default, that improving things was a default, and the only thing to do was find out the details.

2.9.4 Identification and Integration of Motives

Following from the direction of OIT (Deci & Ryan, 1985), Pam’s traumatic experiences, and Altruism born of Suffering (Staub & Vollhardt, 2008) , one is led to think about the internalization of values to come from relating to a role model and acting like that role model, until the actions become part of the self. This is not explicitly stated in SDT (which does not identify action so much as relatedness), but it is quite compatible.

This seems to have been the case with Dave, in fact, it is almost the only theme that can be identified.

Dave’s reasoning is even more reflexive than Mildred’s. He just seemed to do things that seemed to be useful for others without thinking about whether he should do it or why. This observation itself being interesting, as it suggests that helpfulness might be related to long term volunteering, which is not the case (L. A. Penner, 2002) .

In any case, it was difficult to talk to Dave about his motives. Whereas Mildred had certain clear, simple, and to the point explanations, Dave was instead excited to talk about the work and how he met people.

Dave definitely got a feeling of relatedness, but it was evident that the driving motivator was his reflexive sense that this is the sort of thing he was supposed to do.

He did not understand the concept of not continuing to volunteer, except if by severe injury. Admittedly, it could be the case that his answers were a coordinated psychological effort to avoid the issue of his recent problems moving and need for physical therapy at his advanced age.