The relationship between religiosity and work has been a key area of interest in the sociology of religion. The content of both religiosity and work has been transformed. However, the relationship between religiosity and students’ motivation for work is rarely studied, even though volunteering and paid student jobs are increasingly common. Previous research has shown that the largest group of volunteers is composed of university students and secondary school students (Tokhtarova 2014). In this study, we examine paid work of student as well as voluntary work. We seek to answer the question as to how the voluntary or paid work clusters are related to religiosity.

According to the literature (Handy et al. 2010), a volunteer is a person who does work that is not compulsory, driven by some intrinsic motive, and without any financial reward. Volunteering can be intrinsically and/or extrinsically motivated. Following the turn of the millennium, a new type of volunteering has emerged, which is not necessarily based on solidarity but instead reflects career considerations (Hoskins et al. 2020). This career volunteering is no longer motivated by altruism, but rather it is based on purposeful preparation for later employment. Volunteering is thus motivated by different reasons, which may include incentives by the state or the school, volunteering for career development purposes, or volunteering as an introductory phase to paid employment, which in turn leads to the hybridisation of the concept of volunteering (Handy et al. 2010; Bazan 2021). Immediately after the political transformation in CEE, non-governmental organisations based on voluntary participation and non-profit activities existed mainly in church-related environments. In this church-related setting, social patterns of volunteering, which were destroyed in the middle of the 20^th century, also returned (Máté-Tóth & Szilágyi 2020). Over the last decade, our results on students’ civic participation have shown that members of sports and church associations make up the majority of civic participants, as other organisations are not seen as attractive. This partly explains the association between volunteering and religiosity observed in Hungary and the cross border area (Fényes et al.2021; Fényes & Pusztai 2012).  At the same time, in the period of pressure on societies during the COVID-19 crisis and the war in Ukraine, much of the voluntary work was organised through existing social networks. During the war, young people played a crucial role (Carlsen et al. 2020, Pallay et al. 2022).
However, there are young people who have career-building aspirations, but in addition to these goals, they also have the motivation to earn an income, and they do paid work, so that they gain experience and earn money at the same time. Work experience can be acquired not only through volunteering, but also through paid work of students during the semester and lecture period (Masevičiūtė et al.2018).  Through paid work, students are supported in acquiring skills which are important in today’s labour market and enables a shorter and smoother transition from education to work (OECD 2015). Career volunteering and paid work can also be motivated by the desire to seek a vocation. Vocation goes beyond a job which provides a living; instead, it presupposes work which is fulfilling and rewarding, with a sense of calling and mission, whereby even the secularised interpretation of vocation has a transcendent element (Park, 2012). The question is therefore how motivations to work are related to religiosity among 21^st century students. We seek to answer in this study. Combined analyses of voluntary and paid work are relatively rare, with the beneficial effects of this combination found among migrant adults (Wood et al. 2019), but the potential links to religiosity have not been investigated.

The data was collected from a large sample of students (N=2,199) during the academic year of 2018/19. Students were surveyed at higher education institutions located in the Eastern region of Hungary and four other neighbouring countries (SK, RO, UA, SE). Specifically, the survey was conducted in higher education institutions located in the territories of these countries with significant Hungarian minority. It is important to note that the findings of this study only apply to Hungarian minority institutions in these territories and are not representative of the entire countries. In Hungary, quota sampling was carried out (N=1,034), designed to be representative with respect to faculties, field of education (arts and social sciences, economics, sciences, IT, engineering, teacher education) and form of funding. Probability sampling was used in the institutions in other countries, whereby groups of students were surveyed in full during university or college classes (N=1,154). The sample consisted of full-time second-year bachelor’s students and second or third-year master’s students. The sample represented all fields of study. We explored religiosity through religious self-declaration, individual religious practice and the frequency of church attendance. To measure students’ work motivations, we used a Likert scale assessing how the participants rated six items for paid work and eight items for voluntary work. For voluntary work, we reduced the motivation question block used by Clary et al. (1998) to eight items due to scope limitations. The motivational factors of paid and voluntary work were further examined by cluster analysis. Four motivational clusters were formed based on what motivated young people to work. The analysis applied k-means clustering, retaining the following four clusters: self-fulfilment-oriented, independence-oriented, career-oriented worker types, and materialists. We use bivariate analyses to investigate differences in background factors across cluster groups. Students’ gender, age, place of residence, and their parents’ educational attainment did not correlate with motivations for work, but the respondents of the country, relative financial situation of students’ family and students’ subjective self-assessed financial situation showed a significant correlation with work motivation clusters. We examine the factors affecting each cluster group through binary logistic regressions. Dependent variables were the four cluster groups and explanatory variables were those listed above. We hypothesise that paid and voluntary work are simultaneously observed for a certain group of students. We hypothesise that religiosity varies across clusters based on work orientations, with religiosity related to the emergence of a motivational type which includes both altruistic and utilitarian traits.

We identified four types of students by work motivation. Self-fulfilment-oriented workers had a strong motivation to help and displayed a drive to develop skills and relationships, while also seeking fulfilment. Independence-oriented workers had financial independence as their most specific goal, while carrier-oriented workers focussed on gaining knowledge and experience for future employment. Materialist workers had remuneration as their primary purpose. Religiosity had a significant effect for clusters with self-fulfilment and materialist orientation. While the development of self-fulfilment orientation was supported by individual religious practice, the probability of materialist orientation was reduced by community religious practice. Religiosity did not play a role for independence-oriented and career-oriented groups. From the perspective of religiosity, it is noteworthy the self-fulfilment-oriented workers placed an equal emphasis on altruism and utilitarianism, which clearly shows the hybridisation of motivations for voluntary and paid work, while also highlighting the novel post-materialist link between work and religiosity in the examined region. As Inglehart & Oyserman (2004) points out, the acquisition of material values is less and less a life goal for the younger generation, so work is not just a means of earning, but a meaningful activity in which individuals can learn about themselves and develop their own way of life based on enrichment of wellbeing and self-expression. While in the previous period religiousness was associated with altruistically motivated voluntary work and non-religiousness with the pursuit of individual career goals, today's modern religiousness is creating a new attitude towards the employment of youth. Consequently, voluntary work and paid work are not alternatives, but can be a group-building factor if work is also seen as a fulfillment. For this reason, for a certain group of young people who see their lives as a search for meaning, both religiosity and voluntary or paid work can be an essential and determining factor.

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