The authors describe their meta-analysis to review the impacts of mentoring programs for youth and adolescents, noting their research questions and methodology, as well as research results and study limitations.
This paper presents a meta-analysis that encompassed 73 independent evaluations of mentoring programs, directed toward children and adolescents, that were published over the decade of 1999 through 2010. The authors report that findings support the effectiveness of mentoring for improving overall outcomes across behavioral, social, emotional, and academic domains of young people’s development. The most common pattern of benefits is for mentored youth to exhibit gains on outcome measures while nonmentored youth exhibit declines. As a result, the authors suggest that mentoring as an intervention strategy has the capacity to serve both promotion and prevention aims. They also note that programs show evidence of being able to affect multiple domains of youth functioning simultaneously, and they improve selected outcomes of policy interest.