The Research and Reports found below are provided through the efforts of the National Mentoring Partnership (MENTOR) and the National Mentoring Resource Center.
Research Agenda for the Modern Mentoring Movement Summary
As the mentoring field is continually growing and evolving, so must our research about mentoring. MENTOR’s Research Agenda outlines four key areas to meet the emerging needs of the field to inform funders and policy makers about how the mentoring movement can be strengthened. We thank the many researchers, practitioners, and thought leaders who played a role in this project as we continue to ensure that mentoring research is actionable and informed by diverse perspectives.
Who Mentored You?
Who Mentored You? was commissioned by MENTOR, with support from EY, and created in partnership with the Custom Insights Team at Pacific Market Research (now Olympic Research and Strategy), Dr. Sam McQuillin of the University of South Carolina, Shaun Glaze and Kathleen Perez at Inclusive Data, Cecilia Molinari, and Jenni Geiser. Designed to reexamine the mentoring gap, this report found that, while today’s young people are more than twice as likely to be mentored through a program compared to young people thirty years ago, the mentoring gap still exists and has actually grown larger, particularly for key groups of vulnerable youth.
The study also reaffirmed the importance of mentoring relationships in promoting a strong sense of self and feelings of belonging, building community, encouraging exploration, and driving mental and physical well-being. Given the proven effectiveness of mentoring, we must turn up our impact as individuals and a movement to bring mentoring to all young people.
Mentoring for Enhancing Career Interests and Exploration
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Children frequently hear this question from adults in their life, and it takes on added significance as children move into adolescence and young adulthood. Exploring career interests and developing a career are lifelong processes that begin in childhood. In fact, many adults have reported that decisions made during their childhood had an impact on their career. However, knowledge about the breadth of career options that are available is often limited in children and adolescents, with children reporting generic interests such as becoming a doctor, police officer, firefighter, athlete, or teacher. With increasing cognitive complexity, older children also begin to consider their interests, abilities, and the job requirements when thinking about their future career choice. Career interests appear to become more crystalized by high school, supporting the value of creating career exploration opportunities for elementary and middle school-age children.
The review provides many points for programs to consider as they work to connect youth to career-related outcomes, such as considering the youth being reached as well as the goal of the program; although career exploration is something that every mentoring program can scaffold at some level, targeted interventions should consider the specific needs and strengths of the population engaged in programming. Practitioners are also encouraged to train mentors in relational skills, encouraging mentors to create personal bonds and provide social support to their mentees in addition to career support. Finally, practitioners are encouraged to push funders and industry partners to invest in more rigorous evaluations that help grow our knowledge of how mentoring programs can promote CIE for youth.
Mentoring for Enhancing School Attendance
This review examines how youth mentoring influences school attendance, academic performance, and educational attainment (APEA) outcomes. In general, empirical studies reveal that mentoring programs tend to have “small-to-moderate” impact on mentees’ academic outcomes. Importantly, small-to-moderate effects should not necessarily be interpreted as “not meaningful”. Although individual mentors may produce small, positive changes on APEA outcomes, these small effects can have a large cumulative effect. Because mentoring services are among the most frequently provided prevention program offered in the United States[i], small positive effects of mentoring program can equate to large, population changes on APEA outcomes. At the same time, some mentoring programs have integrated specific activities to increase the effects mentors have on APEA outcomes for individual youth participating in their programs.
Mentoring Youth in Rural Settings
This review examines research on mentoring for youth who reside in rural settings. The review is organized around four topics: (1) the documented effectiveness of mentoring for youth residing in rural settings; (2) the extent to which mentor, youth, and program characteristics/practices influence effectiveness of mentoring youth in rural settings; (3) the intervening processes that may link mentoring rural youth to youth outcomes; and (4) the extent to which efforts to reach and engage youth in rural settings achieve high-quality implementation and adopt and sustain programs over time. Over the past few decades, and especially in the last ten years, there has been a slowly growing body of research on mentoring youth in rural settings although much of it lacks methodological rigor.
Mentoring for Enhancing Educational Attitudes, Beliefs, and Behaviors
This review examines research that addresses the potential influence of mentoring for youth on their educational attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors EABBs). In general, from experimental and meta-analytic studies, the effects of mentoring on educational attitudes and beliefs were small and inconsistent across studies and forms of mentoring (e.g. naturally occurring vs. program sponsored). Yet, there is evidence that mentoring has the potential to influence a range of EABBs, including self-esteem, school connectedness, school engagement, and attitudes toward school. The cumulative literature provides some insight into how programs and institutions that offer mentoring might better support mentoring relationships to expand and improve EABB outcomes. These factors include cultural, environmental, social experiences of youth, the strategic selection of program practices that are aligned with EABBs (e.g., setting goals with youth, teaching youth how to cope with stress), and the use of more carefully designed experiments that focus on measuring and improving EABBs. Finally, the review suggests that attention to implementing these enhancements is limited; but that when programs do adopt and implement these programmatic enhancements, mentoring can have a greater positive effect on EABBs.
In addition to the formal review of research on mentoring and EABBs, Implications for Practice based on this research are also included. These practice recommendations focus on actions that mentors or program staff could take to support development of positive EABBs, including the identification of root causes of negative EABBs, supporting growth mindsets and persistence skills, providing emotional support and encouragement, facilitating referrals to tutoring or other direct academic supports, working collaboratively with parents around academic challenges, and both direct advocacy on behalf of the child within schools and teaching youth to advocate for themselves to address points of disconnection. Links to relevant resources and training are provided when relevant.
Mentoring for Preventing and Reducing Substance Use
This review examines research on youth mentoring as a strategy for preventing and reducing adolescent substance use, including opioids. Overall, there were few studies that focused primarily on the impact of youth mentoring on adolescent substance use prevention, and the studies mostly followed either a primary prevention (addressing problems before they occur; targeted to a broad population of youth) or a secondary prevention framework (focusing efforts on at-risk youth). The review found that the studies assessed more commonly used substances (e.g., alcohol and marijuana), with less attention paid to the impact of mentoring on preventing the initiation of hard drug use, including opiates. Therefore, the limited evidence that is available shows tentative promise for mentoring to have a positive effect on the prevention and reduction of substance use among youth. The review identified only two studies that utilized mentoring as an add-on intervention to an evidence-based substance abuse treatment. This is possibly due to the limited focus on the role of mentoring in tertiary prevention efforts (intervention or treatment to prevent harm among youth already abusing substances). The ways in which mentors can promote the recovery process of substance-misusing youth remains unexplored. Of note, studies of natural mentoring showed significant positive effects more frequently than did studies of the impact of programmatic mentoring. It seems that building on youth’s existing social resources and the presence of adult role models may play a meaningful role in preventing adolescent substance use.
The review suggests several take-home messages for mentoring researchers and practitioners. At intake, practitioners can incorporate a more thorough assessment of youth alcohol and illicit drug use and/or exposure to substance use in peer, school, and family contexts. Identifying youth’s risks and needs at early stages of the intervention will prepare mentors to be better equipped to support youth. Given the promising findings on the role of natural mentors, substance use preventative programs can also employ the Youth Initiated Mentoring practice where youth nominate mentors from their own social network. Such an approach may help to promote resilience among youth to resist substance use and associated problems. Finally, future research could explore how mentoring programs can be implemented from secondary and tertiary prevention frameworks. Outreach programs, in particular, can utilize mentoring components to engage and sustain youth in treatment programs.