Support for Youth Thriving: A Randomized Trial of Enhanced Strategies for Mentors

Background

Mentoring is a popular and widespread approach for promoting the healthy development of youth.  Although meta-analyses find that mentoring programs achieve positive social, emotional, behavioral, and educational outcomes, the effects are typically modest and vary within and across programs (DuBois et al, 2011). Striving for better results, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (BBBSA) adapted strategies based on a theory of change for mentors to intentionally support youth thriving by applying concepts from developmental science: identifying sparks, fostering a growth mindset, assessing thriving indicators (i.e., 6C’s of positive development), and supporting goal achievement (Heck et al, 2010). This study reports a randomized trial of the initial implementation of these thriving promotion strategies in 10 BBBSA affiliate agencies across the U.S.

Methods

Youth aged 10-16 yrs enrolling into each BBBSA affiliate completed baseline assessments and, upon matching to a mentor, were randomly assigned within each program to the thriving promotion (n=400) or standard services (n=406) study conditions. Thriving promotion activities included special mentor training, instructional resource materials, guided mentor-mentee discussions/exercises, and staff-facilitated group activities for mentor-mentee matches. Youth were assessed again 15 months after match initiation, with equal response rates across condition (75%). Measures included engagement in thriving promotion activities (intervention condition only), adult support for thriving, indicators of thriving in each domain (i.e., sparks, mindset, 6C’s, goal management), and conduct problems and delinquent behaviors.

Results

Intent-to-treat analyses with multiple imputation of missing data revealed no effects of assignment to the thriving promotion condition on youth outcomes. Half of the youth in the intervention condition (49%) reported positive engagement in 3 or more of 6 key thriving promotion activities. Logistic regression found this relatively high positive engagement was associated with longer mentoring relationship duration and greater adult support at baseline. The logistic regression model, with all demographic and baseline measures, was used to identify a subset from the standard services condition matching the characteristics of the high engagement group. SEM analyses conducted on the high positive engagement and matched comparison groups to evaluate the theory of change found that high positive engagement was a direct predictor of improved adult support for thriving and indirectly associated with improved youth thriving and, in turn, reduced problem behaviors.  

Conclusions

The initial integration of thriving promotion strategies into the BBBSA mentoring program did not yield youth outcomes better than standard mentoring services. However, the findings provided support for the theory of change, suggesting that positive engagement in thriving promotion activities initiated a developmental cascade contributing to higher adult support, greater youth thriving, and fewer problem behaviors. The study also highlighted that engaging participants in thriving promotion activities was fraught with implementation challenges. Thus, mentoring programs wishing to adopt these promising strategies for helping mentors to support youth thriving will need to find effective ways to convey the developmental science concepts through trainings and program activities. Future research should investigate which youth benefit most from thriving promotion activities and which of these activities contribute the most to healthy youth development.