'I Dunno, What Do You Wanna Do?': Testing a Framework to Guide Mentor Training and Activity Selection

Whether relational or goal-directed interactions are most useful in youth mentoring has been frequently debated, but until recently, little work had been done to understand how such interactions manifest to create viable relationship styles. The authors' findings in the first study they explore in this article support Karcher and Nakkula's assertion that relational and goal-directed interactions are distinct. The authors found that both made significant contributions to relationship quality, but for children and preadolescents, relational interactions appeared to be more strongly associated with the quality of the mentoring relationship than did goal-oriented interactions. Karcher and Nakkula further suggest that it is when the focus of interactions (relational and goal-directed) emerges through collaborative dialogue that the strongest relationship styles emerge. In their second study, the authors found that cross-age peer mentoring (school-based) matches that selected their activities collaboratively had higher-quality mentoring relationships (mentor and youth reported) than those matches whose activities were typically selected unilaterally by either the program or the mentee alone. (Contains 1 exhibit, 1 figure, 1 table and 35 notes.)