The Effects of a School-Based Mentoring Program on Adolescent Well-Being: A Dual-Factor Model Perspective

Background: To address the unmet mental health needs of adolescents, alternative mental health service models need to be explored. One solution involves expanding the range of personnel who can deliver mental health services while reconceptualizing mental health service delivery through alternative frameworks such as the dual-factor model (DFM), which assesses symptoms of psychopathology and subjective well-being. Purpose: The current study examined the effectiveness of mentoring to improve mental health using the DFM of mental health as an explanatory framework. Methods: The study took place at a local low-income middle school during the spring 2017, fall 2017, and spring 2018 semesters. One hundred and twelve students were recruited to participate in the study. Sixty-six students were mentored over an 8- to 12-week period with a manualized AMPED (Academic Mentoring Program for Educational Development) mentoring program. Results: When using unidimensional analysis, the mentored students did not significantly improve their subjective well-being or alleviate symptoms of psychopathology compared to the control group. When using a DFM classification, the percentage of students in the four DFM groups was similar to that of previous studies, but tests for higher rates of positive outcomes measured by DFM category status were non-significant. Exploratory analysis found that students in the mentoring group were more likely to make small changes relative to the control group. Conclusion: Consistent with current mentoring research, the changes in the experimental group pre- and post-mentoring were small relative to the control group. However, the study was grossly underpowered to test the research hypotheses. These results warrant further investigation of the feasibility and efficacy of using the AMPED intervention as well as evaluation of other school-based mental health interventions using the DFM framework based on prior analysis and sufficiently powered studies.Psychological, Health, and Learning Sciences, Department o