New study highlights the need to consider mentees’ risks and protective factors

By Jean Rhodes

For decades, the mentoring field has operated with a fairly consistent , and arguably incomplete, logic. Programs need to work with youth who most at risk, assign them a mentor, and let the relationship to do its work.  A new study by Margaret Meldrum and Michael D. Lyons (2026), published in Prevention Science, shows the value of considering the broader ecology of youth’s lives.

Drawing on longitudinal data from Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, Meldrum and Lyons (2026) used a person-centered approach, to identify distinct profiles of mentees based on their risk factors and existing social supports at program entry. Rather than treating risk as a single, additive dimension, they grounded their analysis in Margaret Beale Spencer’s Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST), a framework that has been largely absent from the mentoring literature despite its considerable utility for understanding the experiences of youth navigating structurally inequitable environments (Spencer et al., 1995; Spencer, 2024). At its core, PVEST asks researchers and practitioners to recognize that two youth with identical risk profiles may have very different developmental experiences depending on the social supports available to them and whether those supports feel genuinely accessible (Spencer et al., 1995). Spencer’s Dual-Axis Coping Formulation maps this logic onto four profiles organized around high or low risk in combination with high or low protective factors.

The mentoring field has historically been more attentive to documenting the risks that youth carry than to recognizing the resilience those risks have required them to develop. Meldrum and Lyons (2026) are right to name this as a problem, and to draw on Spencer’s framework to explain why it persists.