Practice Profile: Mentoring for Youth Development

Evidence Rating for Outcomes

Crime & Delinquency | Multiple crime/offense types

Education | Multiple education outcomes

Mental Health & Behavioral Health | Psychological functioning

Mental Health & Behavioral Health | Cognitive functioning

Mental Health & Behavioral Health | Social functioning

Drugs & Substance Abuse | Multiple substances

Date: This profile was updated on May 15, 2023

Practice Goals/Practice Components

Youth mentoring is defined as a “consistent, prosocial relationship between an adult or older peer and one or more youth[s]” (OJJDP N.d.). The goals of mentoring are to reduce risk factors for problem behaviors (such as early antisocial behavior, family management problems, and lack of commitment to school) and to enhance protective factors (such as healthy beliefs, opportunities for involvement, and social reinforcement for appropriate behavior) of at-risk youth.

Mentoring programs can have a prevention or intervention focus and be designed to serve different at-risk populations, such as children living in high-poverty neighborhoods, children of incarcerated parents, children in foster care, abused and neglected youths, youths who have disabilities, academically at-risk students, and adolescents involved in the juvenile justice system (Ahrens et al. 2008; Britner et al. 2006; Goode and Smith 2005).

Mentors can be matched with youth mentees based on numerous factors, such as mutual interests, geographic location, gender, and ethnicity. The pairs meet regularly for support in various aspects of life, such as educating mentees on health and substance misuse; working with mentees to improve coping, problem-solving, and communication skills; involving mentees in community service activities, such as visiting the elderly; and offering cultural activities and educational services/tutoring. Mentors provide their mentees with opportunities for imitation of prosocial behaviors, such as giving advice, participating in recreational activities that are of interest to the mentee, and providing emotional support to foster healthy youth development and diversion from risky behaviors (Tolan et al. 2008). The underlying strategies are to keep the mentees busy and involved in positive experiences, and to provide mentees with feedback and encouragement from the positive mentors with whom they bond.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (BBBS) Community-Based Mentoring (CBM) is an example of a mentoring program that has the goal of supporting the development of healthy youths by addressing their needs for positive adult contact, thereby reducing risk factors for negative behaviors, and enhancing protective factors for positive behaviors. BBBS CBM focuses on meeting the needs of communities that are facing hardship by helping youths withstand the many negative effects of adversity. The program involves one-to-one mentoring between a Big Brother or Big Sister (the mentor or adult) and a Little Brother or Little Sister (the mentee or youth) that takes place in a community setting. More information on this program can be found at Big Brothers Big Sisters Community-Based Mentoring Program.

Key Personnel

Mentors are generally caring, older, nonparental adults in the community without professional training or certification that may present a role inequality with the mentee. Mentors typically are adults but may simply be older peers. Some mentoring programs rely on community volunteers serving as mentors. Other programs provide mentor incentives, either in the form of payment or course credit, rather than relying on volunteerism.

Practice Theory

Mentoring programs are based on the importance of supportive intergenerational relationships for promoting positive youth development and preventing risky behaviors such as delinquency. The developmental model of youth mentoring relationships theorizes an interconnection of social–emotional, cognitive, and identity formation processes through which the mentors promote positive developmental outcomes. First, mentors enhance a youth’s perceptions of social support, to facilitate positive connections with others by modeling prosocial skills and providing a consistent and safe relational context. Youth engagement in shared activities provides opportunities for meaningful conversations that strengthen cognitive skills such as information processing and self-regulation. Finally, mentors promote prosocial identity development by acting as models for desired qualities that youths should emulate. (Raposa et al. 2019).

Crime & Delinquency | Multiple crime/offense types
Tolan and colleagues (2008) analyzed the results from 20 studies and found that mentoring programs for youth development had a small, statistically significant effect (SMD=0.23) on delinquency. This means that youths who participated in mentoring programs were less likely to commit delinquent acts, compared with youths who did not participate in mentoring.

Education | Multiple education outcomes
Tolan and colleagues (2008) analyzed results from 19 studies and found that mentoring programs for youth development had a statistically significant effect (d=0.14) on multiple measures of educational achievement. Additionally, Raposa and colleagues (2019) analyzed results from 51 studies and found that mentoring programs had a statistically significant effect (SMD=0.08) on measures of academic achievement. This means that youths who participated in mentoring programs were more likely to show improvements in measures of educational achievement, compared with youths who do not participate in mentoring.

Mental Health & Behavioral Health | Psychological functioning
Raposa and colleagues (2019) analyzed the results from 46 studies and found that mentoring programs for youth development had a small statistically significant effect (SMD=0.17) on psychological outcomes. This means that youths who participated in mentoring programs were less likely to exhibit psychological symptoms (such as externalizing symptoms, internalizing symptoms, self-regulation, and other mental health symptoms), compared with youths who did not participate.

Mental Health & Behavioral Health | Cognitive functioning
Raposa and colleagues (2019) analyzed the results from 35 studies and found that mentoring programs for youth development had a small statistically significant effect (SMD=0.19) on cognitive functioning outcomes. This means that youths who participated in mentoring programs were more likely to report better cognitive functioning (such as executive functioning and self-cognition), compared with youths who did not participate.

Mental Health & Behavioral Health | Social functioning
Raposa and colleagues (2019) analyzed the results from 43 studies and found that mentoring programs for youth development had a small statistically significant effect (SMD=0.19) on social functioning outcomes. This means that youths who participated in mentoring programs were more likely to report better social functioning (such as social skills, social support, and relationships), compared with youths who did not participate.

Drugs & Substance Abuse | Multiple substances
Tolan and colleagues (2008) analyzed the results from six studies and found mentoring programs for youth development had no statistically significant effect on youth substance use.

Meta-Analysis Snapshot
	Literature Coverage Dates	Number of Studies	Number of Study Participants
Meta Analysis 1	1970-2005	39	9262
Meta Analysis 2	1975-2017	70	25286

Meta Analysis 1

Tolan and colleagues (2008) conducted a comprehensive search to identify studies of mentoring programs that focused on youth at risk for delinquency or engaged in delinquent behavior. Prevention and intervention programs were included if they could be classified as standalone mentoring programs, or they included mentoring as a component. The outcomes of interest included delinquency, aggression, substance use, and academic achievement. The evaluation studies had to have a comparison group (this control condition could be no treatment, waiting list, treatment as usual, or placebo treatment). Studies were limited to programs in predominately English-speaking countries and had to be reported in English. The search covered the years 1970 to 2005.

The search yielded 39 studies that met the criteria for inclusion: 22 were randomized control trials (RCTs), and 17 were quasi-experimental designs (QEDs). Twenty-one studies reported delinquency outcomes, 19 reported academic achievement outcomes, 6 reported drug use outcomes, and 6 reported aggressions as an outcome. Tolan and colleagues reported that the RCTs had larger effect sizes than QEDs (a finding that reverses the more typical finding that QEDs yield larger effect sizes than RCTs). The 39 studies included 9,262 participants (4,732 in the treatment groups, 4,530 in the control groups). A random-effects model was used owing to the heterogeneity across studies.

Meta Analysis 2

Raposa and colleagues (2019) conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis to examine the overall impact of youth mentoring with all outcome studies of intergenerational, one-on-one youth mentoring programs written in the English language from 1975 to 2017. A comprehensive search of the literature published before June 2017 was conducted to identify published and unpublished evaluations of mentoring programs. Computerized databases searched were PsycINFO, ERIC, and ProQuest, and manual searches were conducted of prior meta-analyses and qualitative reviews. Studies were included in the sample if they used a randomized controlled trial or quasi-experimental design to evaluate a formal mentoring program, with a nonparental adult or older youth acting in a nonprofessional helping capacity with a specific younger person to promote positive youth outcomes through the relationship. Studies were excluded if they 1) had similar age peer mentoring; 2) only used group mentoring; 3) included mentees over age 18; 4) used insufficient treatment versus control group differentiation; 5) evaluated programs in which mentoring was not a primary or secondary component; 6) included outcome measures outside of the broad categories of psychological, social, school, health, or cognitive; 7) did not include sufficient information to compute an effect size; or 8) were not published in English.

The search process yielded 70 evaluations of mentoring programs with a sample size of 25,286 youths. More than half of the studies (54 percent) used randomized controlled trials, while the remaining ones (46 percent) used quasi-experimental designs. The average age of mentees was 12 years old, and 55 percent of the mentees were male. The sample included youth mentees who were Black (43 percent), white (32 percent), Hispanic (26 percent), Asian (5 percent), multiethnic (4 percent), Hawaiian (1 percent), American Indian (1 percent), or another ethnicity (13 percent). (Some mentees identified as more than one race, hence the totals’ exceeding 100 percent.) The average age of mentors was 36 years, and 58 percent of the mentors were female. The mentors were white (62 percent), Black (31 percent), Hispanic (9 percent), Asian (6 percent), multiethnic (1 percent), American Indian (1 percent), or another ethnicity (10 percent). Mentoring programs were on average 11 months long, meeting four times a week for about 1.7 hours. Program sites were either at a school (63 percent) or in the community (37 percent) and were predominantly urban/suburban (87 percent), in mixed locations (9 percent), or in rural areas (4 percent). Programs were mainly unstructured (62 percent), semistructured (21 percent), or structured (17 percent), and the great majority (88 percent) did not include a curriculum).

The standardized mean difference between the treatment and control groups was calculated as an effect size measure, with a positive value indicating an advantage for the intervention group over the comparison group. This value was transformed into Hedges’ g to adjust for differences in sample size. In most of the studies, more than one effect size was calculated. A three-level approach to meta-analysis was applied to deal with the interdependency of effect sizes. Three sources of variance are modeled in a three-level meta-analysis: the sampling variance of the observed effect sizes (level 1), the variance between effect sizes from the same study (level 2), and the variance between studies (level 3). The three-level meta-analysis was conducted using a multilevel random effects model. The analyses explored the effects of youth mentoring across five outcome categories: school (51 studies), social functioning (43 studies), health (17 studies), cognitive functioning (35 studies), and psychological outcomes (46 studies).

Date Modified: May 15, 2023

This practice review has been updated to reflect findings from a more recent meta-analysis. In 2013 the practice (originally called Mentoring) was reviewed with meta-analyses by Tolan and colleagues (2008), DuBois and colleagues (2011), and Thomas, Lorenzetti, and Spragins (2011). The practice was rated Effective for reducing delinquency outcomes. The practice was rated Promising in reducing the use of alcohol and drugs and improving school attendance, grades, academic achievement test scores, social skills, and peer relationships. In 2022, a re-review was conducted of the practice’s evidence base. The practice was renamed as Mentoring for Youth Development. The meta-analysis by Tolan and colleagues (2008) remained in the practice’s evidence base, and a new meta-analysis by Raposa and colleagues (2019) was added to the evidence base. Based on these two meta-analyses, the practice remained rated Effective for reducing delinquency and for improving educational outcomes. The practice was also rated Promising in improving psychological outcomes and cognitive functioning and rated No Effects in reducing substance use. In addition, the meta-analysis by DuBois and colleagues (2011) was screened out (because of reporting results based on combined effect sizes with studies that had active comparison groups and inactive comparison groups), and the meta-analysis by Thomas, Lorenzetti, and Spragins (2011) was separated into a new practice, called Mentoring to Prevent Youth Substance Use.

Date Created: July 17, 2024

Rating Process

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Practice Snapshot

Age: 6 - 18

Gender: Male, Female

Race/Ethnicity: White, Black, Hispanic, American Indians/Alaska Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, Other

Setting (Delivery): School, Other Community Setting

Practice Type: Academic Skills Enhancement, Alcohol and Drug Prevention, Afterschool/Recreation, Mentoring, Truancy Prevention, Violence Prevention

Unit of Analysis: Persons

Researcher:
Elizabeth Raposa
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology, Fordham University

44 E. Fordham Rd
Bronx, NY 10458
United States

Practice Profile: Mentoring for Youth Development

Practice Summary

Practice Description

Practice Goals/Practice Components

Key Personnel

Practice Theory

Meta-Analysis Outcomes

Meta-Analysis Methodology

Cost

Other Information

Evidence-Base (Meta-Analyses Reviewed)

Additional References

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