Online mentoring: The promise and challenges of an emerging approach to youth development

This paper reports on an electronic mentoring program, the Digital Heroes Campaign (DHC), in which 242 youth were matched with online mentors over a two-year period. Survey, focus group, and interview data, in addition to analyses of the e-mails that pairs exchanged, were examined in order to assess the nature, types, and quality of the relationships that were formed. Despite youths' generally positive self-reports, deep connections between mentors and mentees appeared to be relatively rare. The findings suggest that online mentoring programs face significant challenges and that further research is needed to determine under what conditions online mentoring is likely to be most effective. Editors' Strategic Implications: Given the infrequent occurrence of close connections, youth mentoring practitioners and researchers must consider whether online mentoring is likely to promote the kind of " relationships" that might be expected to promote positive youth development.