Are Mentoring Programs a Worthwhile Social Investment?

Abstract

It is well recognized that practice far exceeds research in the social services. For a variety of reasons, some interventions are so appealing that they become very popular and proliferate in many communities despite the absence of careful documentation of their impact. Examples of such efforts in the field of youth services include therapeutic camps, after-school programs, service learning, tutoring, and mentoring. If one includes the many unevaluated school-based educational and psychosocial programs, then each year tens of millions of youth are exposed to interventions of one kind or another whose value is unknown. This is not to say that popular, established programs are without merit; researchers do not have a monopoly on good ideas and can learn from educators, clinical practitioners, and child advocates of all stripes. Among the many youth programs in existence that have not been subjected to any outcome evaluations, some are probably beneficial while others probably have little or no demonstrable positive effect—but a few might be harmful, at least to some portion of their participants. It is essential to learn which programs fall into which of these categories. The wise use of available resources from a public health and policy perspective requires credible answers to at least four fundamental questions: (a) how much impact do programs have; (b) in what ways do participants change; (c) what characteristics of the participants, programs, or their evaluations are associated with more desirable results; and, (d) do programs inadvertently have harmful effects? Notice that the first question is not whether programs achieve statistical significance at some conventional probability level; we are now beyond that basic criterion. Well-done meta-analyses can now tell us not only about the statistical significance of change but also something about its magnitude—which can assist policy makers, funders, and administrators in deciding which programs to support. David DuBois and Jean Rhodes are widely recognized experts on mentoring, and in their article they have teamed with a previous collaborator (Jeffrey Valentine) and others (Nelson Portillo and Naida Silverthorn) to provide an up-todate systematic review of mentoring programs (DuBois, Portillo, Rhodes, Silverthorn, & Valentine, 2011, this issue). These authors are to be applauded for addressing the four fundamental questions noted above (as well as several others) in a careful, defensible, and systematic way in their article. Among their major conclusions is that mentoring programs can be successful interventions that lead to positive changes in youths’ behaviors, attitudes, and academic performance. Most important, they place the magnitude of change achieved in different outcome areas in context by comparing them to changes of similar magnitude obtained by other psychosocial programs for young people. In doing so, mentoring is placed alongside other effective interventions for youth. Another very important aspect of the way they conducted their analyses comes from the findings in 53 samples in which the authors compared the relative change over time that occurred for mentored and nonmentored youth. The authors found that while mentored youth improved significantly over time (mean effect size of 0.25), nonmentored youth showed a significant decline in their adjustment (mean effect of minus 0.17). This way of analyzing the data suggests the potential two-dimensional benefits of mentoring: Not only can mentored youth improve over time across different types of outcome measures, but the absence of mentoring can lead to declines in adjustment for some youth. In other words, mentoring can make some things better and at the same time prevent some things from getting worse. All of the overall findings reported by DuBois and his team must be qualified by the presence of several moderators of program outcomes, which is another main lesson from their review. The way programs are conducted and evaluated can make a difference. They identified six factors that were associated with better results in addition to the experimental rigor of the studies (e.g., targeting youth from high-risk backgrounds and careful matching of mentors and youth), and each of these factors deserves consideration in future programs. It is very encouraging that mentoring seldom leads to negative effects (see Fig. 3, p. 68) and that mentoring is a flexible intervention strategy in that positive results can be obtained for youth of different ages and when mentoring is offered in different settings by different types of mentors and through different intervention formats. The authors are also careful in qualifying their conclusions given the current status of the