Potential mentor predictors of motivation to attend a cultural humility training: Ethnocultural empathy and self-efficacy to provide racial/ethnic identity support

Formal youth mentoring programs pair an adult volunteer with a youth, hoping to promote positive youth development while preventing negative outcomes such as poor academic, social or behavioral functioning. Mentors working with youth who experience systemic forms of oppression due to their racial or ethnic identity can experience challenges forming strong relationships, such as the potential for mentors’ racial/ethnic biases. Mentor training focused on addressing cultural differences, sometimes called cultural humility training, may be one way to promote positive mentoring relationships; but uptake of this training has been mixed. The primary aim of the study was to assess whether mentor’ self-reported sense of ethnocultural empathy (SEE) and self-efficacy to support youths’ racial/ethnic identity (SE) are associated with more motivation for attending a training in cultural humility. Participants (n = 100) were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk and were limited to U.S. residents who had experience working in one or more community-based mentoring programs in the past 10 years. A two-step ordinary least squares regression was conducted with mentor demographics, SEE factor score, SE factor score, and Motivation factor score were included as step 1 predictors, followed by an interaction variable between SEE and SE factors at step 2. Results suggest that ethnocultural empathy, gender and ethnicity were associated with increased motivation to attend a cultural humility training. Specifically, those who reported more ethnocultural empathy attitudes, identified as female (ß = 0.14p < 0.05) and non-Hispanic (ß = 0.14, p < 0.05) were more motivated to attend a cultural humility training. Implications for the field of youth mentoring are discussed.