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The Long Arm of Mentoring: A Counterfactual Analysis of Natural Youth Mentoring and Employment Outcomes in Early Careers

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American Journal of Community Psychology

Abstract

Young people often develop natural mentoring relationships with nonparental adults during adolescence and young adulthood. While much has been learned about the benefits of natural mentoring for more proximate outcomes such as mental health and education, relatively little is known about the causal impact of youth mentoring relationships on career opportunities. This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) survey to explore the effects of different kinds of natural mentoring relationships on employment outcomes during the early career years (when workers are in their late twenties and early thirties). Whereas traditional methods of causal conditioning show a broad range of employment benefits from being mentored, results from counterfactual analysis using propensity score matching reveal that the benefits of mentoring are confined to intrinsic job rewards. The findings imply that mentors help steer youth toward intrinsically rewarding careers.

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Notes

  1. Propensity scores can be used for causal analyses in a variety of ways (weighting, conditioning, stratification, etc.). The matching approach is emphasized here because we consider it to be the best technique given our research question and data.

  2. Analytic sample means fall within the confidence intervals for the weighted sample for the mentoring variable and for 6 of the 7 dependent variables (the benefits outcome was slightly higher than expected).

  3. Respondents were asked to report on only one mentor and therefore we are regrettably unable to account for the presence of multiple mentoring relationships simultaneously.

  4. Some respondents (156) reported that their mentor was a younger sibling. Since this does not fit the standard definition of a mentoring relationship, which involves a younger mentee with an older mentor, these cases were excluded from the analysis.

  5. The discontinuous employment variable is right-skewed. We used several alternative transformations (e.g., top coding, logging), but none of the results were substantively different from the original version.

  6. The index is based on the factor scores from principal components factor analysis with varimax rotation.

  7. Attrition from wave 1 to wave 4 was 24 %.

  8. In order to address concerns about the use of replacement, we follow the recommendation of Morgan and Winship (2006) and report on the more specific estimate of the average treatment effect for the untreated (ATU) rather than the more general average treatment effects (ATE). More details on the ATU are provided below.

  9. These bias estimates are standardized by the sample variances for the treated and non-treated subsamples (for details, see Rosenbaum and Rubin 1985).

  10. The matching for the smaller (job rewards) sample was similarly effective, reducing the average bias from 14.13 to 1.22. The maximum bias was no more than |3.0|.

  11. Only 9 cases fell off the common support region for the smaller (job rewards) sample.

  12. For full time employment, we report the unstandardized coefficients from logistic regression. All other conditional models are based on OLS regression.

  13. To estimate these models, we averaged the estimates from the imputed files. Supplemental analyses show that the results are no different from what is obtained from regressions using the mi estimate functions in Stata.

  14. In particular, we attempted different coding of the full time employment variable (as 40 h per week, as total hours worked per week, and as log of total hours worked per week), the discontinuous employment variable (as dichotomized, as top-coded, and as log transformed), and the income variable (as non-logged). We also estimated conditional effects for the benefits outcome using Poisson regression and the intrinsic rewards outcomes using ordinal logistic regression. None of these strategies altered the direction or significance of the results.

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Acknowledgments

This research was generously supported by a U.S. Department of Labor’s Scholars Program grant. Special thanks to Albert Yung-Hsu Liu, Jacob Kraemer Tebes, and the anonymous reviewer for their comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the paper. Lance Erickson provided expert assistance on the statistical software coding. This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by Grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis. Opinions reflect those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agencies.

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McDonald, S., Lambert, J. The Long Arm of Mentoring: A Counterfactual Analysis of Natural Youth Mentoring and Employment Outcomes in Early Careers. Am J Community Psychol 54, 262–273 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-014-9670-2

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