Who Uses Youth Mentoring Frameworks and Guidelines? A Scoping Review

Mentoring is a popular mode for supporting young people through periods of uncertainty. Youth mentoring frameworks have been developed in countries including Australia, the USA and New Zealand to guide the creation and evaluation of mentoring programs. Yet, how frequently and to what degree these frameworks are utilised is unknown. In addition, the research on youth mentoring is international and multi-disciplinary, leading to fragmentation and disorganisation of key ideas and benchmarks. This paper investigates how frequently and to what degree established youth mentoring frameworks are employed in the literature using a scoping review methodology. The searchers returned 318 results. After screening, 37 studies were included in the review. Included literature was organised into three themes: 1) papers that did not report using a mentoring framework or guidelines in the development of the program/intervention under examination; (2) papers that did report a framework, but did not attempt to create new guidelines; (3) and papers that did not report a framework, but did attempt to create new guidelines. We argue that youth mentoring frameworks do not strongly inform research and that there is a clear need for international collaboration to develop and integrate youth mentoring frameworks.