Purpose: This study identifies and describes the behaviors in, and attitudes toward, the mentoring process of a group of adults in enduring and successful one-to-one mentoring relationships with at-risk youth. Recent research has emphasized the importance of mentoring programs promoting higher quality relationships, given that closer and more enduring relationships are associated with greater improvements in outcomes among the youth participants (e.g., Parra, DuBois, Neville, Pugh-Lilly, 2002). However, little is known about how successful mentors approach their relationships with their mentees or about the nature of their efforts toward building close and sustained relationships.

Method: Adult and youth participants in an established volunteer mentoring program were interviewed. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 matched-pairs of male and female adults (predominantly white) and adolescents (racially and ethnically diverse, ages 12-17 years) who had been in a continuous mentoring relationship for a minimum of 1-year and were identified by agency staff as having a successful relationship. The transcriptions of these three-part interviews (adolescent alone, adult alone, and the pair together) were analyzed in two ways. Employing a holistic-content approach (Leiblich, Tuval-Mashiach, & Zilber, 1998), thematic analyses were conducted with the transcripts from each matched pair by two coders using the qualitative analysis software ATLAS.ti. Conceptually clustered matrices (Miles & Huberman, 1994) were then constructed to detect patterns in the themes across the pairs.

Results: These mentors described prioritizing building the relationship over working toward improvements in the adolescents' psychological or academic functioning in the early phases of the relationship. For some mentors, this required them to adjust their expectations or ideas about what they had imagined the relationship might be like in order to meet the individual needs of their mentee. Later efforts directed toward promoting change in the adolescent were rooted in their stated desire to promote the youth's overall positive development, rather than framed in remedial terms. Put another way, these mentors recounted what they described as their efforts to help these youth realize the potential the mentors had grown to see in them. The youth described feeling seen and known by their mentors and identified some specific behaviors that had contributed to their feeling this way, including the adult's consistent presence, their positive regard for them, and the evident pleasure they took in spending time with them.

Implications: This study provides new information for social workers who are and will be directing and serving in a rapidly growing number of mentoring programs. It offers a detailed picture of the approaches to the mentoring process taken by a group of mentors in enduring relationships, from the perspective of the mentors, their mentees, and through examinations of their interactions with each other. The findings from this study highlight the commitment that mentoring requires and the relational skills and capacities mentors need in order to develop and sustain close connections with at-risk youth. This study also offers areas for consideration by program staff in the recruitment and selection of volunteers and in the orientation, training and on-going support of adult mentors.