(Press-News.org) New research from North Carolina State University finds that young people who have had mentors are more likely to find work early in their careers that gives them more responsibility and autonomy – ultimately putting them on a path to more financially and personally rewarding careers.
"We wanted to look at the long-term impacts on mentees in naturally occurring mentorship relationships, rather than participants in formal mentorship programs," says Dr. Steve McDonald, an associate professor of sociology at NC State and lead author of a paper on the work. "And we found that having a mentor provides a clear benefit well into their working lives."
The researchers evaluated data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, which asked more than 12,000 people in their teens and early 20s if they had ever had a mentor. Six years later, those young people were surveyed again and asked about their work. But the researchers did more than just compare numbers from the survey.
"People from socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds are more likely to have mentors," McDonald says. "We wanted to find a way to determine which professional benefits stem from mentorship, as opposed to benefits that came from socioeconomic advantages."
The researchers did this by using a model that compared people from nearly identical backgrounds in which the only difference was whether they had a mentor. The researchers then examined how these different groups fared in the job market.
"We found that overall employment and compensation were about the same," says Joshua Lambert, co-author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at NC State. "But people who had mentors when they were younger had greater 'intrinsic' job rewards."
Intrinsic job rewards are things like authority and autonomy, which make work more personally fulfilling.
"The findings imply that mentees learn to place a higher value on jobs with more intrinsic rewards – and those same characteristics are associated with long-term career success," McDonald says.
INFORMATION:
The paper, "The Long Arm of Mentoring: A Counterfactual Analysis of Natural Youth Mentoring and Employment Outcomes in Early Careers," is published online in the American Journal of Community Psychology. The research was supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Labor.
Childhood mentors have positive impact on career success
2014-09-11
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Graphene paints a corrosion-free future
2014-09-11
The surface of graphene, a one atom thick sheet of carbon, can be randomly decorated with oxygen to create graphene oxide; a form of graphene that could have a significant impact on the chemical, pharmaceutical and electronic industries. Applied as paint, it could provide an ultra-strong, non-corrosive coating for a wide range of industrial applications.
Graphene oxide solutions can be used to paint various surfaces ranging from glass to metals to even conventional bricks. After a simple chemical treatment, the resulting coatings behave like graphite in terms of chemical ...
Lurking bright blue star caught!
2014-09-11
This release is available in Japanese.
A team led by Gastón Folatelli at the Kavli IPMU, the University of Tokyo, has found evidence of a hot binary companion star to a yellow supergiant star, which had become a bright supernova. The existence of the companion star had been predicted by the same team on the basis of numerical calculations. This finding provides the last link in a chain of observations that have so far supported the team's theoretical picture for this supernova. The results are published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and have wide implications for ...
High levels of physical activity linked to better academic performance in boys
2014-09-11
A recent Finnish study shows that higher levels of physical activity are related to better academic achievement during the first three school years particularly in boys. The study published in PLOS ONE was conducted in collaboration with the Physical Activity and Nutrition in Children (PANIC) Study conducted at the University of Eastern Finland and the First Steps Study at the University of Jyväskylä.
The study investigated the relationships of different types of physical activity and sedentary behavior assessed in the first grade to reading and arithmetic skills in grades ...
Smokers who consume too much sodium at greater risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis
2014-09-11
A new study published online in the journal Rheumatology today indicates that the interaction between high sodium intake and smoking is associated with a more than doubled risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis (RA).
The study, carried out by Björn Sundström and colleagues from the Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine, Rheumatology at Umeå University, Sweden, was carried out to see whether recent animal and human cell study results that showed a link between a high sodium intake and RA would yield similar results in a nested case-control study of data from ...
'Fat shaming' doesn't encourage weight loss
2014-09-11
Discrimination against overweight and obese people does not help them to lose weight, finds new UCL research funded by Cancer Research UK.
In a study of 2,944 UK adults over four years, those who reported experiencing weight discrimination gained more weight than those who did not. On average, after accounting for baseline differences, people who reported weight discrimination gained 0.95kg whereas those who did not lost 0.71kg, a difference of 1.66kg.
The research, published in the journal Obesity, contradicts the common perception that discrimination or 'fat shaming' ...
More needed to protect our sportspeople from brain injury, say Birmingham experts
2014-09-11
Two University of Birmingham academics are calling for more research to be carried out looking at how the brains of sportspeople – including children – react when they receive a blow to the head.
Their call is echoed by Dawn Astle and Peter Robinson. Dawn Astle, is the daughter of former West Bromwich Albion player Jeff Astle who, an inquest found, died from brain trauma caused by heading heavy footballs - a condition known as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Peter Robinson is the father of Ben Robinson, whose son died as a result of repeated concussions during ...
The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology: 1 in 4 people with diabetes worldwide live in China, but a new approach could help transform their care
2014-09-11
Diabetes has become a major public health crisis in China, with an annual projected cost of 360 billion RMB (nearly 35 billion British pounds) by 2030, but a new collaborative approach to care that uses registries and community support could help improve diabetes care, according to a new three-part Series about diabetes in China published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology.
China has the largest number of people with diabetes of any country in the world, and the disease has reached epidemic proportions in the adult population [Paper 1]. In 1980, less than 1% of Chinese ...
Study: Role of emergency contact is mistaken for advance directive
2014-09-11
DETROIT – More than 95 percent of patients treated in an Emergency Department mistake their emergency contact as the designated medical decision maker for end-of-life care, according to a new study by Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
The study is being presented Wednesday at the 20th International Congress on Palliative Care in Montreal.
Erin Zimny, M.D., a Henry Ford Emergency Medicine and Palliative Care physician and a study co-author, attributes the misunderstanding to health care practitioners routinely asking patients for their emergency contact information without ...
Genomic analysis reveals that a high-risk leukemia subtype becomes more common with age
2014-09-11
More than one-quarter of young adults with the most common form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) have a high-risk subtype with a poor prognosis and may benefit from drugs widely used to treat other types of leukemia that are more common in adults, according to multi-institutional research led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital investigators. The study appears in the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
ALL is the most common childhood cancer. The research focused on a subtype of ALL known as Philadelphia chromosome-like ALL (Ph-like ALL). In ...
Chemists discover way nose perceives common class of odors
2014-09-11
Biologists claim that humans can perceive and distinguish a trillion different odors, but little is known about the underlying chemical processes involved. Biochemists at The City College of New York have found an unexpected chemical strategy employed by the mammalian nose to detect chemicals known as aldehydes.
According to a team led by CCNY Associate Professor of Chemistry Kevin Ryan and Columbia biologist Stuart Firestein, some of the nose's many aldehyde receptors don't detect the aldehyde by its structure and shape directly. Rather, the aldehyde is recognized by ...