Mentoring relationships: implications for practitioners and suggestions for future research

This review of the literature is intended to help HRD practitioners facilitate healthy mentoring relationships and better address potentially negative functions or outcomes of the mentoring process within their own organizations. This work provides a review of the social learning processes that play a role in mentoring relationships. In addition, it reviews the functions and outcomes of mentoring for individuals and organizations, as well as the characteristics of good mentors and the influence mentors have upon career choice. Finally, the implications for mentoring relationships among individuals with disabilities, minorities and women are briefly reviewed in order to provide practitioners with a sense of the breadth of individuals who may benefit from well-planned or well-implemented mentoring. This article concludes with critical comments on the current state of mentoring research. Suggestions are made for future research in order to stimulate greater study into certain aspects of mentoring.     

Low-Income Mothers' Conversations About Emotions and Their Children's Emotional Competence

This study examined the linkage between low-income mothers' conversations about emotions and their children's understanding of emotion. Forty-five low-income preschoolers and their mothers were videotaped while viewing a wordless picture book designed to elicit talk about emotions. Three maternal and child emotional language behaviors were coded from the videotapes: (a) unelaborated comments about emotions; (b) explanations about the causes and consequences of emotions; and (c) empathy-related statements. The children's questions about emotions were also coded. In a separate interview, the preschoolers were administered tasks that assessed emotional expression knowledge, emotional situation knowledge, and emotional role-taking. The results revealed that emotional situation knowledge was positively predicted by mothers' empathy-related statements. Mothers' explanations about the causes and consequences of emotions were uniquely related to emotional role-taking ability. There were very few correlations between the mothers' and children's talk about emotions. Results are discussed in terms of the functional significance of mothers' emotional language for young children's emotional competence.     

Parental functioning and child sexual abuse

Eighty-two mothers and 46 fathers of emotionally disturbed youth in a day treatment program completed the Family Assessment Device (FAD) at time of intake. Interviews with therapists enabled classification of families into three groups: those whose client (the youth) had been sexually abused, those where sexual abuse was suspected but not confirmed, and those without a sexual abuse history. All cases of abuse were non-incestuous. Comparisons of the confirmed abuse and non-abuse groups were made, using three types of analyses. ANOVA of parental responses to the FAD by group yielded significance for mothers but not for fathers, with mothers of abused children reporting more family dysfunction in problem-solving and roles than mothers of non-abused children. Second, significant differences between parents according to group were found in the abused sample in problem-solving, communication, and general functioning, but not in the non-abused sample; mothers reported significantly greater pathology in their families than did fathers. Third, comparison of differences between mothers and their children within families yielded a greater number of differences in the non-abused group. Significance was obtained in affective responsivity and behavior control in both samples. Additionally, however, significant differences in communication and roles were obtained in the non-abused group. Caution in differentiating between incestuous and non-incestuous families is suggested. Implications of this research for family interventions, especially with regard to mother/child perceptual congruence, are discussed.     

Factors Associated With Substance Use Disorders Among Traumatized Homeless Youth

This study aimed to identify homeless youths’ lifestyle and trauma-related risk factors as well as protective factors associated with alcohol use disorder or no disorder and drug use disorder or no disorder. Youth receiving homeless services in Denver (n = 201), Austin (n = 200), and Los Angeles (n = 200; N = 601) completed quantitative interviews assessing demographic information, alcohol and drug use, homeless lifestyle risk factors, trauma-related risk factors, and protective factors. Findings showed differences in trauma-related risk factors between alcohol and drug use disorders, but not homeless lifestyle risks. Protective factors predicted substance use disorders beyond risk factors. Understanding trauma-related risk and protective factors associated with substance use disorders could improve interventions.     

Manager Characteristics and Employee Job Insecurity around a Merger Announcement: The Role of Status and Crossover

Most existing research theorizes individual factors as predictors of perceived job insecurity. Incorporating contextual and organizational factors at an information technology organization where a merger was announced during data collection, we draw on status expectations and crossover theories to investigate whether managers' characteristics and insecurity shape their employees' job insecurity. We find having an Asian as opposed to a White manager is associated with lower job insecurity, whereas managers' own insecurity positively predicts employees' insecurity. Also contingent on the organizational climate, managers' own tenure buffers, and managers' perceived job insecurity magnifies insecurity of employees interviewed after a merger announcement, further specifying status expectations theory by considering context.     

Risk Detection and Self‐Protection Among Homeless Youth

Utilizing qualitative interviews with a large sample of 145 homeless youth seeking services at homeless youth service agencies from across three U.S. cities (Los Angeles, Denver, and Austin), this study sought to explore youths' perspectives on ways in which they detect risk and protect themselves on the streets. Results indicated that youth use a combination of internal cues (affective responses) and external cues (reading people) to detect danger, although many times danger was described as undetectable. Certain contexts, includes those that were unfamiliar, difficult to escape, or involved drugs were described as most dangerous. In response to these dangers, youth employed self‐protection strategies such as carrying weapons, banding together with trusted others, isolating, or seeking programing to leave the streets.     

A First Look: Disparities in COVID-19 Mortality Among US-Born and Foreign-Born Minnesota Residents

Population Research and Policy Review - This research brief provides one of the first examinations of the impact of COVID-19 mortality on immigrant communities in the United States. In the absence...     

The Malleability of Environmentalism

In this article, we predict and find that self-perceptions of environmentalism are changed by subtle manipulations of context and, in turn, affect environmental behavior. In Study 1, we found that people exhibit greater positive assessments of their environmental behaviors (1) in the context of denying harm to the environment than in the context of claiming to help the environment, and (2) in situations where behaviors are evaluated subjectively than in situations where behaviors are evaluated more objectively. In Study 2, we explored the relationship between self-perceptions of environmentalism and environmental behaviors. Our data suggest that environmentally friendly behaviors may be promoted by leading people to perceive themselves as good environmentalists.     

The Costs of Future Polio Risk Management Policies

Decisionmakers need information about the anticipated future costs of maintaining polio eradication as a function of the policy options under consideration. Given the large portfolio of options, we reviewed and synthesized the existing cost data relevant to current policies to provide context for future policies. We model the expected future costs of different strategies for continued vaccination, surveillance, and other costs that require significant potential resource commitments. We estimate the costs of different potential policy portfolios for low-, middle-, and high-income countries to demonstrate the variability in these costs. We estimate that a global transition from routine immunization with oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) to inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) would increase the costs of managing polio globally, although routine IPV use remains less costly than routine OPV use with supplemental immunization activities. The costs of surveillance and a stockpile, while small compared to routine vaccination costs, represent important expenditures to ensure adequate response to potential outbreaks. The uncertainty and sensitivity analyses highlight important uncertainty in the aggregated costs and demonstrates that the discount rate and uncertainty in price and administration cost of IPV drives the expected incremental cost of routine IPV vs. OPV immunization.