Date

5-22-2024

Department

School of Behavioral Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD)

Chair

Kevin Ganey

Keywords

mentoring, psychosocial development, sense of belonging, undergraduate students

Disciplines

Psychology

Abstract

Mentoring has been studied in corporate and academic environments as a means of providing career and psychosocial support for young colleagues or students. Initially, mentoring was viewed as a single dyadic relationship between a mentor and a mentee. However, in recent years, it has been better understood in terms of mentoring constellations or group mentoring, as multiple mentors may best aid the development of individuals. While much mentoring research has examined professional development, this study focused on the psychosocial development that mentoring can provide. The relationship between mentoring and sense of belonging was also examined. It was hypothesized that students would measure higher on the Identity and Intimacy subscales of an index of psychosocial development and on indices of Sense of Belonging at the end of a group mentoring program than they did at the beginning of the program. Participants were 151 undergraduate students enrolled in a freshman group mentoring program at a public university. The study design was a quantitative repeated-measures field experiment. Two repeated-measures multivariate analysis of variance were calculated to determine the impact of the mentorship program on measures of psychosocial development and sense of belonging. A mixed analysis of variance was also calculated to examine the mentorship program’s effects on sense of belonging for both White and non-White participants. Overall, the results did not support the hypothesis for psychosocial development and partially supported the hypothesis for sense of belonging. Implications, suggestions for future research, and limitations are also discussed.

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