Youth mentoring relationships in context: Mentor perceptions of youth, environment, and the mentor role
Open accessAbstract
Youth mentoring is primarily understood as a relationship between mentor and mentee, yet mentors often enter into home, school, and other community settings associated with youth they serve, and interact regularly with other people in mentees' lives. Understanding how and why mentors negotiate their role as they do remains underexplored, especially in relation to these environmental elements. This qualitative study drew on structured interviews conducted with professional mentors (N = 9) serving youth at risk for adjustment problems to examine how mentors' perceptions of their mentees and mentee environments informed their sense of how they fulfilled the mentoring role. Mentors commonly characterized problems youth displayed as byproducts of adverse environments, and individual-level strengths as existing "in spite of" environmental inputs. Perceptions of mentees and their environments informed mentors' role conceptualizations, with some mentors seeing themselves as antidotes to environmental adversity. Mentors described putting significant time and effort into working closely with other key individuals as well as one-on-one with mentees because they identified considerable environmental need; however, extra-dyadic facets of their roles were far less clearly defined or supported. They described challenges associated with role overload and opaque role boundaries, feeling unsupported by other adults in mentees' lives, and frustrated by the prevalence of risks. Community-based mentoring represents a unique opportunity to connect with families, but mentors must be supported around the elements of their roles that extend beyond mentor-mentee relationships in order to capitalize more fully on the promise of the intervention.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The emotional component is the most frequently engaged and includes aspects of trust, reliability, consistency, support, and authenticity in mentoring programs in all formats operating with American, European, Israeli, and Australian youth.
“The emotional component, which is the most frequently engaged, includes aspects of trust, reliability, consistency, support, and authenticity in mentoring programs in all formats operating with American, European, Israeli, and Australian youth [78,80,85,86,87,88,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96].”
From Unpacking Community-Based Youth Mentoring Relationships: An Integrative Review (2021) · cites this paper as [89]
The Results (§4.2; page unavailable) describe close mentor–mentee relationships as mentors’ primary day-to-day focus and mention consistent involvement; the Discussion (§5; page unavailable) describes authentic bonds and support. The paper does not establish that an emotional component is the most frequently engaged across mentoring formats or across American, European, Israeli, and Australian youth. (LLM, conf=0.88)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredYounger American mentors (aged 18-25) reported relatively more feelings of being overwhelmed due to role overload, exposure to risk-environment or opaque role boundaries, and feeling unappreciated and unsupported by the mentee's parents.
“Younger American mentors (aged 18–25) reported relatively more feelings of being overwhelmed due to role overload, exposure to risk-environment or opaque role boundaries, and feeling unappreciated and unsupported by the mentee’s parents [89].”
From Unpacking Community-Based Youth Mentoring Relationships: An Integrative Review (2021) · cites this paper as [89]
The Discussion reports role overload, environmental challenges, unclear role boundaries, and frustration at limited support from families and other adults. But the Participants section reports mentors aged 25–49 (mean 33.1), not a group aged 18–25, and the paper does not establish that younger mentors reported these feelings relatively more often. It also does not specifically say that mentees’ parents made mentors feel unappreciated. (LLM, conf=0.91)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThe literature has pointed to some advantages of older mentors in long-term mentoring programs with or without a defined endpoint, although the findings are inconclusive.
“The literature has pointed to some advantages of older mentors in long-term mentoring programs with or without a defined endpoint, although the findings are inconclusive.”
From Unpacking Community-Based Youth Mentoring Relationships: An Integrative Review (2021) · cites this paper as [89]
The Method sections describe a long-term mentoring program and report the mentors’ ages, but do not compare outcomes by mentor age. The Introduction mentions challenges reported by older adult mentors, not advantages. Searches for mentor-age advantages, inconclusive findings, and programs with or without defined endpoints found no passage supporting the claim. (LLM, conf=0.73)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 59 · Cited by 74
- Authors
- Lakind, D., Atkins, M., & Eddy, J. M.
- Affiliations
- University of Illinois Chicago (US)
- University of Washington (US)
- Corresponding author
- Lakind, Davielle
- Venue
- Children and Youth Services Review
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2015-06
- Volume
- 53
- Pages
- 52-60
- ISSN
- 0190-7409 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4387543
- OpenAlex
- W2048444476
- Cited by
- 74
- References
- 59
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 2 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 8.75
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Children and Youth Services Review (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- NICHD, NIH, USPHS (R01 HD054880)
- Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF11015)
- Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (68500)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Mentoring and Academic Development
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Youth Development and Social Support
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Counseling Practices and Supervision
- Keywords
- youth mentoring, at-risk youth, environmental adversity, role boundaries, role overload, community mentoring, family involvement, school-based mentoring, mentoring relationships
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
