The impact of Big Brothers Big Sisters programs on youth development: An application of the model of homogeneity/diversity relationships

Hyejoon Park, Minli Liao and Shantel D. Crosby

Children and Youth Services Review, 2017, vol. 82, issue C, 60-68

Abstract: Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (BBBSA) is a non-profit agency that provides mentoring for at-risk, economically disadvantaged youth. Its three objectives include helping youth to improve self-competence, offering encouragement to improve school performance, and fostering youth relationships with family members, peers, and other adults through one-to-one mentoring relationships. In this study, we examined these mentoring relationships, assessing whether gender match types and program types are associated with the developmental areas of school-aged children in the BBBSA program. To measure protégé confidence, competence, and caring, we employed Ragins' model of homogeneity/diversity and utilized multivariate ordinary least square regression with 267 matched pairs from the BBBSA program-based outcome evaluation, Our findings illustrated that same-gender matches were negatively associated with competence, second, that cross-gender matches of female mentors/male protégés showed better competence and caring outcome than a same-gender of female mentors/female protégés, third, that same-gender matches of male mentors/male protégés showed better improvement on caring score than a same match of female mentors/female protégés, and fourth, that community-based programs had significantly higher confidence and caring scores than school-based programs. Implications for practice, policy, and future research are also discussed.

Keywords: Mentoring program; Big Brothers Big Sisters of America; Cross-gender matches; Same-gender matches; Homogeneity/diversity relationship model; Program types (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190740917303493
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:82:y:2017:i:c:p:60-68

DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2017.09.009

Access Statistics for this article

Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey

More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().