Social Support in Group Mentoring: A Network Analysis of In-person and Remote Formats

• In Event: Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Topic - Social Relationships

Abstract

Many-to-many mentoring (MTMM; Huizing, 2012) interventions present opportunities for youth to develop important socio-cultural skills and make lasting group contributions (Kuperminc, 2016), but group mentoring involves complex interactions that are not yet well understood. It is not clear what role youth play in group mentoring processes such as the provision of social support, how support behaviors co-occur across a group structure, or what support behaviors impact group cohesion. Additionally, as some camps are moving to remote or socially distanced settings, it is important to understand how group mentoring processes differ in remote/online and in-person formats.

We present results from an exploratory study of two MTMM camps for diverse young women and gender expansive youth ages 13-19. One camp was conducted in-person, while the second was conducted online. Although the camps are formal social support interventions (Barrera & Prelow, 2000), youth are not assigned individual mentors. Therefore, these camps are a good context for understanding support behaviors and relationship building within relatively naturalistic settings. This study describes cross-sectional social network analyses, examining youth and adult campers’ participation in various social support behaviors, and directly comparing network patterns between in-person and online formats.

Youth and adults completed surveys nominating sources of relational support within the camp community (encouragement, help with difficult moments, space for positive risk-taking, contributing to sense of belonging and feelings of closeness). Models were fit using exponential random graph modeling (Snijders et al., 2006) to test for significant effects on support behaviors and calculate effect sizes. Model fit was assessed using AIC and BIC. Structural factors (reciprocity, transitivity; Grunspan et al., 2014) were included in the modeling process to describe any group effects. Supporting qualitative data was also collected from youth and mentor interviews.

In the in-person camp setting, adults were nominated more often than youth for all support behaviors. However, youth still played a substantial role in encouraging others and cultivating feelings of closeness, and a non-trivial role in other support behaviors. Support ties were consistently transitive and reciprocal, suggesting that these social structural properties may be important for understanding interactions among group members. In the remote mentoring context, results differed from the in-person setting in a few salient ways: youth were more likely to contribute to feelings of group belonging than adults, support between campers who were already close to each other were more prevalent (i.e., higher effect size for pre-existing close ties), and perceived closeness ties tended to not be transitive, signaling less group cohesion.
These findings support and build on Griffith, Melton, & Deutsch’s (2019) process model of relationship building within group mentoring contexts and have practical implications for practitioners in mentoring spaces. These results show some support behaviors are easily within reach for the entire community, while others are more specialized and reciprocal, or require more trust and intimacy. They suggest that transitivity and mutuality are crucial for group cohesion. The study identifies differences between support in in-person and remote mentoring contexts and offers suggestions for productive group mentoring in online spaces.

Author

• Mike Scanlon, foundry10
  Presenting Author