Research Alert: Study Explores Female Volunteers’ Motivations for Mentoring
Article
Larsson, Pettersson, Eriksson, & Skoog (2016). Initial motives and organizational context enabling female mentors’ engagement in formal mentoring – A qualitative study from the mentors’ perspective. Children and Youth Services Review, 71, 17-26.
You can access this article here. You can join Dr. David DuBois’s youth mentoring research and practice listserv by emailing Dr. DuBois at dldubois@uic.edu.
Editor’s note: From time to time on the NMRC Blog we will cross-post announcements about research studies on mentoring drawing from the research listserv run by NMRC Research Board Chair Dr. David Dubois.
Today we highlight a Swedish study released in 2016, exploring women’s motivations for becoming mentors at a Swedish mentoring organization called The Girl Zone. This qualitative study used interviews to identify the motives of each volunteer and identify common patterns as they discussed their desire for becoming a mentor. The researchers identified six categories that emerged describing the volunteers’ motivations for getting started with mentoring, including an interest in empowering women, a desire to be a responsible citizen, compassionate reasons, the desire for meaning, or a self-interested motive (i.e. pursuing one’s career interests by building mentoring skills). In addition to these six categories, the study revealed three major human needs that becoming a mentor may meet for many women: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
This study emphasizes the importance of understanding the motivations prospective volunteers to help programs recruit enough mentors, as well as mentors who are the best fit for the youth being served. For example, the study suggests that women may be more motivated to pursue mentoring opportunities when they connect their own positive or negative life experiences with a sense of compassion toward and responsibility for helping to support others. Additionally, the study’s explores women’s needs as they relate to their involvement in mentoring programs, suggesting that feeling included in the organization, receiving clear messages about expectations and rules, and having opportunities to make authentic, individual contributions to the organization and their mentees’ lives could be important elements of women’s experiences with mentoring.
How has your organization explored volunteers’ potential motives for mentoring, and how has this informed the way you engage mentors?