Volunteers, Place, and Ultramarathons: Addressing The Challenge of Recruitment and Retention
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ultramarathons are often hosted in peripheral areas featuring challenging natural landscapes. Given limited local volunteer pools in these areas, the recruitment and retention of visiting volunteers is crucial to the sustainability of these events, yet little is known about the importance of the destination or place in terms of the volunteer experience. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to gain insight into the role that place plays in volunteer experiences at an ultramarathon in a peripheral area. A case study methodology was adopted with a focus on volunteers at the Canadian Death Race in Grande Cache (GC), Alberta, Canada. Semistructured interviews with event hosts, local volunteers, and visiting volunteers provided insight into the place dimension of the volunteer experiences. In phase 1, interviews with event/community hosts confirmed that local volunteer retention was challenging due to the growing demands of the event and to local volunteer fatigue. A systematic thematic analysis in phase 2 found that volunteers were connected to the destination through the place-based themes of: 1) beauty, 2) remoteness, 3) event, and 4) community. These findings demonstrated that "place mattered" in the experience of local and visiting volunteers. Therefore, organizers should actively recognize the importance of place when recruiting and retaining volunteers for these types of events in remote communities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it