Youth and Informal Mentoring: The Mediating Role of Shared Decision-Making on Youth Resilience

Abstract

Background The study of resilience seeks to understand how some young people grow up in adversity end up doing better than their peers in similar circumstances. Factors in the social environment may support resilience in young people from multi-problem families. For young people in youth care having an informal mentor, rather than care as usual, may increase youth resilience, through increasing their quality of relationship with adults and their perception of shared decision making (SDM). Aim The aim of the study is to explore the mechanisms that lead to resilience in a sample of young people in youth care. The possible mediating effect of SDM on the relationship between having an informal mentor (compared to care as usual) and youth resilience was examined. Additionally, for participants with a mentor, SDM was examined as a mediator between the quality of the relationship between mentor and youth resilience. Methods Data from the GRIP project was used. Participants were 67 adolescents in youth care with a multi-problem family background aged 10 to 18 (treatment group with a mentor, n = 39 and care as usual group, n =28). Results were collected using self-report questionnaires: CYRM-12 to measure youth resilience, PARA to assess relationship quality (mentor group only) and SRS to determine shared decision-making. Two mediation analyses were conducted. Results Analysis suggest that young people who have a mentor have higher SDM which partly explains why they have higher resilience. There was no mediation effect of SDM on the link between relationship quality between the mentor and the young person and resilience. Conclusion Findings support the idea that young people from multi-problem families with informal mentors have higher resilience because they feel more involved in decision making. This suggests informal mentors can play an important role in the social system for such young people.