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Mentoring programs for adolescents: a research summary

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Abstract

This summary reviews the research conducted on youth mentoring programs from the mid-1980s through the late 1990s. A number of studies have documented the varied benefits youth derive through participation in programmatic mentoring ranging from improved relationships to a reduction in the initiation of drug and alcohol use. Not all mentors or mentoring programs, however, are equally effective. Strategies that mentors use to foster the development of positive relationships and effective program practices, related to screening, training, and ongoing support are also discussed. Finally, some questions that remain to be addressed by the mentoring field are presented.

Section snippets

What impact does mentoring have on youth?

Since the growth of mentoring programs for disadvantaged youth began in the early 1980s, a number of studies have been conducted to determine the benefits to youth of participation in such programs. As a result, the field has gradually been building a body of evidence that programmatic mentoring can have a number of positive benefits for youth.

Research on the impact of mentoring has been conducted on programs with various target populations: Project RAISE [4], Across Ages [5], and TeamWorks [6]

Making relationships work

A number of studies have looked at mentoring relationships to better understand why some matches are successful and others are not 13, 14, 15, 16. In particular, what can mentors themselves do to ensure that a relationship is more likely to succeed? The findings across studies are fairly consistent regarding practices of effective mentors, compared with less successful ones.

The key to creating effective mentoring relationships lies in the development of trust between two strangers 3, 16.

Effective program practices

One of the strongest conclusions that can be drawn from the research on mentoring is the importance of providing mentors with support in their efforts to build trust and develop a positive relationship with youth. Volunteers and youth cannot be simply matched together and left to their own devices; programs need to provide an infrastructure that fosters the development of effective relationships [3].

Across the mentoring programs that have been evaluated, the extent to which they include

Mentor recruitment

How does a program find enough adults with flexible time and the emotional and financial resources to take on the demands of mentoring at-risk youth? Across programs, the youth desiring mentors nearly always outnumber the adults who volunteer their services; locating sufficient numbers of adults represents a major challenge for most programs 3, 4, 16.

The most effective strategy for recruitment seems to be word of mouth; many programs successfully use existing mentors to recruit their friends,

Questions for future research

Mentoring research over the past 15 years has generated important findings. First and foremost, the field now has definitive evidence of the positive benefits mentoring can produce for the youth being served by these programs. We have also learned that unrelated youth and adults can come together to form meaningful and satisfactory relationships but not without time and the right attitude. Not only does effective mentoring require effort on the part of the volunteers, but programs, too, must

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