Handbook of Youth Mentoring (Sage Program on Applied Developmental Science Series) » (New Edition)

David L. DuBois, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Division of Community Health Sciences within the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  He received his doctorate in clinical-community psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He has authored numerous peer-reviewed studies of youth mentoring, including a meta-analytic review of the literature on the effectiveness of youth mentoring programs.  In 2003, he co-chaired the National Research Summit on Mentoring.  Along with Jean Rhodes, he then co-authored the National Research Agenda for Youth Mentoring that emerged from the Summit.  Currently, he is conducting research on youth mentoring with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health and the William T. Grant Foundation.  He serves as a consultant to numerous local, state, and national mentoring organizations and has been a mentor himself in a Big Brothers/Big Sisters program.

Michael J. Karcher, Ed.D., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Education and Human Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio.  He received a doctorate in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University and a doctorate in Counseling Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin.  He conducts research on school-based and cross-age peer mentoring as well as on adolescent connectedness and pair counseling.  He currently conducts the Study of Mentoring in the Learning Environment (SMILE), which is a three-year research project funded by the William T. Grant Foundation to examine the effects of school-based mentoring.

The field has not been well defined or articulated, yet there are growing numbers of youth mentoring organizations such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, which alone includes some 500 agencies across the country. To address the gap in the literature, editors Dubois (community health sciences, U. of Illinois, Chicao) and Karcher (education and human development, U. of Texas, San Antonio) have brought together contributions from, primarily, psychologists in the US with a particular interest in family studies, human development, and social service to create this integrative handbook. Thirty-six contributions discuss concepts and foundations, mentoring relationships, developmental and cultural perspectives, how to recruit and sustain volunteer mentors, how to evaluate programs and integrate them with other services, contextual and population specific mentoring, and public policy. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR