This article looks into how volunteers deal with their biographies and social embeddedness to make sense of their engagement in mentoring before they are matched. It draws on a qualitative investigation on a community...This article looks into how volunteers deal with their biographies and social embeddedness to make sense of their engagement in mentoring before they are matched. It draws on a qualitative investigation on a community-based pilot youth mentoring program for “unaccompanied refugee minors” in Austria. This article reveals how already trained, local adults actively relate to “family,”“migration” and “previous activities” in their meaning-making. It shows how they negotiate their personal life and existing relationships in the process of turning into a future “godparent.” The discussion of findings against the state of the art leads the way to two heuristic claims: firstly, the study provides grounded arguments for an extension of the conventional mentoring concept on the side of the mentor. Secondly, for a more relational and processual approach towards the mentors’ side, both biographical and social network dimensions need to be integrated in methods and designs of youth mentoring research.展开更多
文摘This article looks into how volunteers deal with their biographies and social embeddedness to make sense of their engagement in mentoring before they are matched. It draws on a qualitative investigation on a community-based pilot youth mentoring program for “unaccompanied refugee minors” in Austria. This article reveals how already trained, local adults actively relate to “family,”“migration” and “previous activities” in their meaning-making. It shows how they negotiate their personal life and existing relationships in the process of turning into a future “godparent.” The discussion of findings against the state of the art leads the way to two heuristic claims: firstly, the study provides grounded arguments for an extension of the conventional mentoring concept on the side of the mentor. Secondly, for a more relational and processual approach towards the mentors’ side, both biographical and social network dimensions need to be integrated in methods and designs of youth mentoring research.
