The Test of Time: Predictors and Effects of Duration in Youth Mentoring Relationships
- 1 April 2002
- journal article
- clinical trial
- Published by Wiley in American Journal of Community Psychology
- Vol. 30 (2), 199-219
- https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1014680827552
Abstract
The effects and predictors of duration in youth mentor relationships were examined. The study included 1,138 young, urban adolescents (Mean age = 12.25”, all of whom applied to Big Brothers Big Sisters programs. The adolescents were randomly assigned to either the treatment or control group, and administered questions at baseline and 18 months later. Adolescents in relationships that lasted a year or longer reported the largest number of improvements, with progressively fewer effects emerging among youth who were in relationships that terminated earlier. Adolescents who were in relationships that terminated within a very short period of time reported decrements in several indicators of functioning. Older adolescents, as well as those who had been referred for services or had sustained emotional, sexual or physical abuse, were most likely to be in early terminating relationships, as were married volunteers aged 26–30 and those with lower incomes. Several dyadic factors were also found to be related to earlier terminations, including race, gender, and relationship quality.Keywords
This publication has 29 references indexed in Scilit:
- The Influence of Mentoring on the Peer Relationships of Foster Youth in Relative and Nonrelative CareJournal of Research on Adolescence, 1999
- Rejection Sensitivity and Children's Interpersonal DifficultiesChild Development, 1998
- Does Mentoring Work?Evaluation Review, 1998
- Who Cares? Toward an Integrated Theory of Volunteer WorkAmerican Sociological Review, 1997
- The Influence of a Big Brothers Program on the Adjustment of Boys in Single-Parent FamiliesThe Journal of Psychology, 1997
- Determinants of Turnover Among VolunteersHuman Relations, 1990
- Expectancies, values, and achievement in junior high school.Journal of Educational Psychology, 1990
- Finding order in disorganization: lessons from research on maltreated infants' attachments to their caregiversPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,1989
- Security in Infancy, Childhood, and Adulthood: A Move to the Level of RepresentationMonographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1985
- An introduction to the logic, assumptions, and basic analytic procedures of two-stage least squares.Psychological Bulletin, 1978