Entries by Jean Rhodes

Rising Star: Meet Dr. Lindsey Weiler

The Weiler Research Lab is directed by Lindsey M. Weiler, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota. The lab develop, test, and optimize preventive interventions for youth and families. The goal of this research is to identify effective strategies for fostering healthy development among marginalized and vulnerable populations.  […]

Meet Professor Heidi Levitt, expert on therapeutic relationships

  Clinical psychologist Heidi Levitt discusses what’s helpful in relationships JR:  What would say are 2 or 3 core features that need to be present in all helping relationships HL: Empathy, Congruence/Genuineness, Mutual understanding of (and agreement with) what is ‘helping’ in that relationship JR: You observed that the therapist acted as a surrogate for others’ […]

Four strategies for improving the field of youth mentoring

by Jean Rhodes Youth mentoring programs sit at the nexus of treatment and prevention science, offering both the structure for creating helping relationships and the apparatus for scaling them to many youth. Thus, they are exceptionally well-positioned to benefit from the lessons and innovations from both fields. Treatment science provides the rationale and resources for […]

What Works In Mentoring? New UVA Scale Can Shed Light

By Stell Simonton, Youth Today What makes mentoring programs effective? And what makes some programs more effective than others? These questions have existed for years in youth development research. “We knew there was good empirical evidence for mentoring, but we didn’t know why. We just knew it showed benefits,” said Patrick H. Tolan, the Charles […]

Three key factors that lead to mentor satisfaction

Martin, S. M., & Sifers, S. K. (2012). An evaluation of factors leading to mentor satisfaction with the mentoring relationship. Children and Youth Services Review, 34(5), 940-945. Summarized by Bridget Nestor, Editorial Assistant, Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring Introduction: Research suggests that mentoring relationships can provide positive outcomes for both mentor and mentee. Most literature, however, has […]

Psychology Today Book Review: How Youth Mentoring Programs Can Become More Effective

This post is a review in Psychology Today of the book, Older and Wiser: New Ideas for Youth Mentoring in the 21st Century by Glenn C. Altschuler Before Odysseus departed to fight the Trojan War, Homer tells us, he asked Mentor, his friend, to watch over his household and Telemachus, his son. Centuries later, the […]

New questionnaire captures the key processes in youth mentoring

Tolan, P. H., McDaniel, H. L., Richardson, M., Arkin, N., Augenstern, J., & DuBois, D. L. (2020). Improving understanding of how mentoring works: Measuring multiple intervention processes. Journal of Community Psychology. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jcop.22408 Posted on August 25, 2020by youth-nex By Julia Augenstern Highlights: Mentoring programs are essential resources in many communities and one of the best supported approaches for fostering […]