Rhodes, Jean

Jean Rhodes has devoted her career to understanding the role of mentors in promoting positive developmental outcomes among children and adolescents. Her studies are among the first to yield empirical findings regarding the availability of mentors in urban populations and the ways in which mentors influence adolescent adjustment over time. These findings provide ample evidence of the extraordinary potential of mentoring relationships, while also exposing the rarely acknowledged risk for harm that unsuccessful relationships can render. A deeper understanding of these important relationships has led to interventions and policies that better address the developmental needs of youth.

Born and raised in New Jersey, Rhodes enrolled in 1979 at the University of Vermont, where she took courses in psychology. Her instructor, George Albee, a founder of community psychology and staunch advocate of the primary prevention of psychopathology, became her lifelong mentor. Albee's compelling arguments for prevention led her to search for meaningful interventions that would “give psychology away” to the public. Mentoring programs, in which trained volunteers are paired with vulnerable youth, would ultimately hold that promise.

After completing her PhD in community/clinical psychology at DePaul University and a clinical internship at the University of Chicago, Rhodes became an assistant professor in the psychology department at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Building from observations and findings regarding the protective influence of caring, nonparent adults, she launched a longitudinal study of the role of natural mentors in the lives of urban youth. Her work was aimed at illuminating the underlying processes by which mentors promote change, the extent to which protective relationships could be arranged through mentoring interventions, and the conditions under which such interventions were most effective. She began by examining the role of natural mentors in the lives of minority adolescent mothers. In addition to improved psychological functioning, adolescents with natural mentors exhibited better vocational and educational outcomes and lower levels of alcohol consumption during pregnancy (Rhodes, Contreras, & Mangelsdorf, 1994; Rhodes, Ebert, & Fischer, 1992). These studies of adolescent mothers deepened her understanding of the meaning, effects, and changing nature of natural mentor relationships within the broader context of youth's lives.

Despite the promise of mentors, Rhodes was increasingly noticing that many urban adolescents did not have extensive networks of support and could not readily find an older adult to serve as a natural mentor. To help address the needs of children and adolescents who lacked such adult supervision and guidance, volunteer mentoring programs were being increasingly advocated. As a community psychologist, Rhodes saw mentoring interventions as a means of redressing the diminishing availability of caring adults and of providing one-on-one support to a broad range of vulnerable youth. She thus began examining how, and under what circumstances, such interventions were most effective. This work led to her collaboration with Jean Grossman in the secondary analysis of data from a large, national study of Big [Page 943]Brothers Big Sisters. Their analyses of the impact study's data were designed to shift the major questions from simply “Does mentoring work?” to the more subtle terrain of “How?” and “Under what circumstances?”

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