Mentorship and Social Work Research

Currently, I am engaged in a research project on a topic that is very dear to my heart and central to my professional identity: mentorship. Colleagues and I are collecting quantitative and qualitative data from students and faculty members about academic and nonacademic mentorship, focusing attention on self-efficacy, balancing personal and professional development, and issues regarding power and privilege. By the time you read this, we will have presented some of our preliminary findings at the Society for Social Work and Research conference; we are excited to hear feedback on our interpretation of what our sample had to say. Perhaps some of you contributed data! The focus of this project is specific to mentorship of doctoral students in social work. Being involved in this research, however, has motivated me to consider the role of mentorship much more broadly. An unspoken and perhaps unappreciated tenet of social work research is its reliance on the generosity of experienced scholars who give their time and talent to encouraging those behind them.Mentoring relationships provide training in applied research methods, without a doubt. But they do much more than that. They provide entries into fruitful partnerships with practitioners, policymakers, and advocates. They show novice researchers how to manage myriad responsibilities with grace. They teach skills to manage crises, which inevitably arise because things never quite go according to plan. They shed light on the interpersonal skills (effective communication, problem solving, negotiation and compromise, among others) that successful social and behavioral research requires. And they add links to an interconnected, multigenerational chain of social work scholars and educators.