These include a failure of evaluations to assess several key outcomes of policy interest (e.g., juvenile offending, obesity prevention) or to determine whether benefits for youth are sustained at later points in their development. Several other aspects of our findings, however, underscore a need for caution. Collectively, these findings point toward the flexibility and broad applicability of mentoring as an approach for supporting positive youth development. Similarly, although programs typically have utilized adult volunteers and focused on cultivating one-to-one relationships, those that have engaged older peers as mentors or used group formats From a developmental standpoint, benefits of participation in mentoring programs are apparent from early childhood to adolescence and thus not confined to a particular stage of development. Programs also show evidence of being able to affect multiple domains of youth functioning simultaneously and to improve selected outcomes of policy interest (e.g., academic achievement test scores). It appears then that mentoring as an intervention strategy has the capacity to serve both promotion and prevention aims. The most common pattern of benefits is for mentored youth to exhibit positive gains on outcome measures while nonmentored youth exhibit declines. Overall, findings support the effectiveness of mentoring for improving outcomes across behavioral, social, emotional, and academic domains of young people’s development. The meta-analysis encompassed 73 independent evaluations of mentoring programs directed toward children and adolescents published over the past decade (1999–2010). We also expected that effectiveness would vary as a function of differences in both program practices and theĬharacteristics of participating young people and their mentors. These processes are presumed to be conditioned by a range of individual, dyadic, programmatic, and contextual variables.īased on this model and related prior research, we anticipated that we would find evidence for the effectiveness of mentoring as an approach for fostering healthy development among youth. This model posits an interconnected set of processes (socialemotional, cognitive, identity) through which caring and meaningful relationships with nonparental adults (or older peers) can promote positive developmental trajectories. As a guiding conceptual framework for our analysis, we draw on a developmental model of youth mentoring relationships (Rhodes, 2002, 2005). In this article, we use meta-analysis to take stock of the current evidence on the effectiveness of mentoring programs for youth. Important questions remain, however, about the effectiveness of these types of interventions and the conditions required to optimize benefits for young people who participate in them. Funding and growth imperatives continue to fuel the expansion of programs as well as the diversification of mentoringĪpproaches and applications. Currently, more than 5,000 mentoring programs serve an estimated three million youths in the United States. During the past decade, mentoring has proliferated as an intervention strategy for addressing the needs that young people have for adult support and guidance throughout their development.
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