ISSN: 1758-1907

Diabetes Management

Mentoring Relationships

 The relationships that develop between youth and their mentors are thought to be the central route through which mentoring can benefit (or, inadvertently, harm) youth (Rhodes, 2005; Karcher & Nakkula, 2010a). Thus, it is important to be able to assess the salient characteristics, or “quality,” of youth’s mentoring relationships.   Mentoring programs generally understand the importance of relationship quality and its potential role in fostering program benefits for youth. In fact, many programs have made relationship quality a central component of their internal evaluation activities. But programs often struggle to determine which components of relationship quality are most essential to measure and often use “homegrown” tools or limited measures of relationship satisfaction, rather than digging deeper into how the relationship is experienced across many dimensions or from multiple viewpoints. And when programs do try to use research-backed measures, they are faced with a dizzying array of options to choose from and it is difficult for them to gauge their relative merits and potential fit with their programs.   This section of the Measurement Guidance Toolkit is intended to help programs with this process of selecting reliable and valid tools for assessing the quality of the mentoring relationships that they are cultivating through their efforts.  

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