Thomas Keller

• Ph.D.
• Professor at Portland State University

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: To truly improve health equity and accessibility, we must develop a diverse and inclusive workforce. The BUILD EXITO program developed as a collaboration between a network of undergraduate programs and a CTSA hub and now has become a sustainable resource that will outlive NIH funding. We will disseminate our successful model. METH...

Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) facilitates mentoring relationships between youth and volunteer mentors. Although research has examined outcomes for youth in BBBS, relatively less investigation has been undertaken for volunteer outcomes. This study explored factors associated with changes in psychological well-being among BBBS volunteer mentors. Pa...

This study investigates how the implementation of program-level practices by formal youth mentoring programs is associated with the quality of youth mentoring relationships as contexts for youth development and also examines whether this connection is mediated by the mentor-staff working alliance. Using data from mentors (n = 542) participating in...

Most research on youth mentoring relationships has focused on the mentor–mentee dyad, yet caregivers play an important role in supporting these relationships. Drawing on a large, multisite sample of youth in formal mentoring programs (N = 2165), this study investigated associations between caregiver–mentor collaboration and mentoring relationship o...

To promote diversity in the STEM workforce, undergraduate research training programs incorporating a variety of intervention strategies have been developed to support students from historically underrepresented backgrounds in overcoming numerous systemic barriers to pursuing careers in science. However, relatively little research has focused on how...

A significant body of research has demonstrated that mentoring relationships support positive youth development. The quality of the mentoring relationship has been identified as a predictor of positive youth outcomes. However, limited research has examined how engagement in a mentoring program may be related to youth depressive symptoms specificall...

Youth referred to mentoring programs vary considerably in the range and severity of difficulties (i.e., behavioral, internalizing, social and academic) and environmental challenges they face. However, their patterns of risk and corresponding consequences for mentoring have rarely been investigated. This study draws on data for youth participants in...

This study sought to examine how social class bias may be enacted by mentors and mentoring program staff within community-based youth mentoring relationships and how these biases may influence the mentoring relationship. A narrative thematic analysis was conducted with interviews from mentors, mentees’ parents/caregivers, and mentoring program staf...

Research experience provides critical training for new biomedical research scientists. Students from underrepresented populations studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are increasingly recruited into research pathways to diversify STEM fields. However, support structures outside of research settings designed to help thes...

There are critical gaps in the youth mentoring knowledge base arising from methodological limitations, including an over-reliance on self-report measures, as well as an overall lack of precision. Direct observational methods allow for more precise comparison across mentoring dyads because, in contrast to respondents applying their own idiographic m...

While formal youth mentoring can positively influence youth connectedness, little research has studied the specific approaches mentors engage in that support mentee social development. This study examines how mentors' specific approaches are uniquely associated with youth connection outcomes in formal community-based mentoring. Participants were 76...

The authors developed a novel tool, the CREDIT URE, to define and measure roles performed by undergraduate students working in research placements. Derived from an open-source taxonomy for determining authorship credit, the CREDIT URE defines 14 possible roles, allowing students and their research mentors to rate the degree to which students partic...

Most youth mentoring programs rely on volunteers to serve as mentors to youth. This study investigates factors associated with motivations for volunteering in this capacity, specifically altruistic and self-oriented reasons for becoming a mentor. Because adults who volunteer as mentors and youth mentees typically come from different socio-cultural...

Formal youth mentoring programs typically rely on volunteers to serve as mentors to young people, with training and guidance from agency staff. A fundamental program practice is to provide ongoing support and supervision to volunteer mentors by engaging in regular contact to monitor the progress of the mentoring relationship and offer guidance and...

Highly committed mentors may be less likely to end their mentoring relationships with their mentees. Theory suggests commitment is predicted by relationship satisfaction, investment, and perceptions of available alternatives. Mentoring program practices may influence commitment, but little research has investigated potential mechanisms. Using data...

Models of persistence and success in undergraduate research training emphasize the importance of engagement and integration across social, educational, research, and career settings. Students are likely to benefit from multiple sources of mentoring to meet their multi-dimensional needs for support across these domains. As part of a comprehensive tr...

Many young people experience social isolation and loneliness, which can have adverse effects on physical and psychological well-being. We propose that intergenerational relationships created through formal youth mentoring programs have the potential to reduce the social isolation of young people. Mentoring programs also enable adult volunteers to f...

Background Although early closure of formal youth mentoring relationships has recently begun to receive some attention, more information about factors that contribute to premature endings, and how those factors interact, is needed so that empirically-based program practices can be developed and disseminated to prevent such endings and to ensure tha...

Scant empirical attention has been devoted to understanding endings in youth mentoring relationships, despite the frequency with which they occur. This study examined data from a mixed‐methods study of mentoring relationship endings in which youth mentees, the youth's parents or guardians, mentors, and program staff were surveyed about the closure...

In many mentoring programs, mentor–youth pairs have the latitude to engage in a wide range of activities together across varying community settings. Within this context, program staff are tasked with supporting development of high‐quality relationships between mentors and youth. To date, however, this role of program staff has been largely overlook...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the Building University Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) initiative to increase engagement and retention of undergraduates from diverse backgrounds in biomedical research. Portland State University, in partnership with ten other academic institutions, received a BUILD award and develope...

This study addressed fundamental questions regarding the capacity of youth mentoring programs designed for at-risk populations to prevent criminal offending in early adulthood. The My Life weekly mentoring model for foster youth in high school uses individual and group mentoring strategies to enhance understanding and application of self-determinat...

Background and purpose As part of the NIH BUILD initiative to diversify the scientific workforce, the EXITO project is a large multi-institutional effort to provide comprehensive support and training for undergraduates from traditionally underrepresented student populations who aspire to health-related research careers. Portland State University, a...

p>To provide multi-dimensional support for undergraduates from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds who aspire to careers in research, the BUILD EXITO project, part of a major NIH-funded diversity initiative, matches each scholar with three mentors: peer mentor (advanced student), career mentor (faculty adviser), and research mentor (research...

A randomized control trial involving 806 youth (ages 10-16; 85.4% low-income households) served in U.S. Big Brothers Big Sisters affiliates investigated effects of incorporating activities to promote youth thriving into mentoring relationships over a 15-month period. Outcomes included support for thriving in youths' relationships with adults, youth...

Objective: This study uses the Support Network Assessment for Practice (SNAP) approach to measure the support provided to young people transitioning from foster care. Methods: The SNAP was administered on two occasions, approximately 7 months apart, to a cohort of transition-age foster youth (n ¼ 27). Analyses investigated measurement reliability a...

Individuals with disabilities are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. The purpose of this study was to experimentally evaluate the impact of a STEM mentor intervention and differences between students matched with mentors with or without disabilities on career planning outcomes. An independent groups × repe...

Background: The education and training of early career biomedical translational researchers often involves formal mentoring by more experienced colleagues. Purposes: This study investigated the nature of these mentoring relationships from the perspective of mentees. The objective was to understand the challenges and issues encountered by mentees...

This article examines the use of student debates to promote substantive knowledge and policy practice skills. The authors present a pedagogical rationale for student debates, describe the incorporation of debates into a child welfare policy course, and report the results of an evaluation. Students demonstrated significantly greater increases in sel...

Creating social service programs that promote sustainability requires attention to both the historical and theoretical foundations of interventions and their current and future applications with clients in the field. Formal youth mentoring programs have been around for more than a hundred years, offering support and guidance to children and youth w...

This prospective, mixed-method study presents an in-depth view of school-based youth mentoring relationships using qualitative data from direct observations, in-depth interviews, and open-ended questionnaires with mentors and students. The dimension of interpersonal tone, referring to the interaction style between adult mentor and student, was inve...

Despite the long history and widespread popularity of youth mentoring, only in the past two decades has an academic literature emerged to support the development of program policies and practices. This study examines knowledge development in the field of youth mentoring, with special attention to trends in the number and nature of articles publishe...

Purpose: Youth in foster care represent a highly traumatized population. However, trauma research on this population has focused primarily on maltreatment rather than the full spectrum of trauma experiences identified within the DSM-IV. The current study aims to fill this gap by reporting the prevalence of exposure to specific types of traumatic e...

This prospective, mixed-method study investigates the development of school-based mentoring relationships using direct observations, in-depth interviews, and questionnaires from the perspective of mentors and students. A pattern-oriented analysis of qualitative data explores the diversity observed in the life-course of mentor-student relationships....

This prospective, mixed-methods study investigated how the nature of joint activities between volunteer mentors and student mentees corresponded to relationship quality and youth outcomes. Focusing on relationships in school-based mentoring programs in low-income urban elementary schools, data were obtained through pre-post assessments, naturalisti...

The Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring (SIYM) at Portland State University is an intensive week-long seminar designed to offer a highly interactive educational opportunity for experienced professionals and leading researchers in the field of youth mentoring. The current study explores the extent to which SIYM represents an example of a successful...

This study investigated whether more complex maltreatment experiences predicted higher levels of depressive symptomatology for young adults and examined the role of social support during late adolescence in that association. Specifically, the study tested whether social support had a direct effect on depression and whether it mediated and/or modera...

Distinctive combinations of factors are likely to be associated with serious alcohol problems among adolescents about to emancipate from the foster care system and face the difficult transition to independent adulthood. This study identifies particular subpopulations of older foster youths that differ markedly in the probability of a lifetime diagn...

This chapter employs a conceptual framework based on the relationship constructs of power and permanence to distinguish the special hybrid nature of mentoring relationships relative to prototypical vertical and horizontal relationships common in the lives of mentor and mentee. The authors note that mentoring occurs in voluntary relationships among...

This study reports the prevalence of PTSD, major depression, alcohol abuse/dependence and substance abuse/dependence diagnoses assessed with a structured clinical interview protocol in a population-based, multi-state, age cohort of older adolescents about to exit child welfare systems. PTSD was the most common diagnosis and was observed at rates ab...

This chapter contains section titled: Context of Youth Mentoring What Purpose is Youth Mentoring Meant to Serve? Why do Individuals Become Mentors? How do Mentoring Relationships Develop? How do Mentoring Relationships Influence Youth Development? Conclusion Author Note References Context of Youth Mentoring What Purpose is Youth Mentoring Meant to...

The transition to adulthood is marked by new roles and responsibilities in such interrelated domains as education, employment, and family formation. This study investigates the capacity of adolescents on the verge of emancipation from the child welfare system to navigate this transition. To explore heterogeneity in adolescents' preparation for inde...

Anecdotal reports of the protective qualities of mentoring relationships for youth are corroborated by a growing body of research. What is missing, however, is research on the processes by which mentors influence developmental outcomes. In this article, we present a conceptual model of the mentoring process along with a delineation of some of the c...

Comprehensive community care principles emphasize the importance of positive community-based activities for children with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD), and caregivers frequently indicate the need for recreation and after-school programs.This study examined the involvement of children with EBD in positive youth development programs and i...

Conceptual and empirical work on youth mentoring naturally tends to focus on the relationship between mentor and child. However, the parent/guardian and agency caseworker also may contribute to the success or failure of the mentoring intervention, and program effects may be partially mediated by the child’s interactions with these individuals. This...

A small proportion of children exhibit extreme and persistent conduct problems through childhood. The present study employed the multiple-domain model of Greenberg and colleagues as the framework for person-oriented analyses examining whether parent-child attachment combines with parenting, family ecology, and child characteristics in particular co...

The theory of reasoned action (TRA) is used to model decisions about substance use among young mothers who became premaritally pregnant at age 17 or younger. The results of structural equation modeling to test the TRA indicated that most relationships specified by the model were significant and in the predicted direction. Attitude was a stronger pr...

Children of substance abusing parents have an elevated risk for experiencing disruptions in household composition and for engaging in problem behaviors. This study investigated whether multiple parent figure transitions predicted the likelihood of delinquency and drug use among a sample of early adolescents with parents receiving methadone treatmen...

With a growing number of children living in kinship foster care, it is important to understand how youths are faring in kinship care compared to youths in non-kinship care. In the present study, we first evaluate teacher ratings of problem behaviors exhibited in school by youths in kinship and non-kinship foster care. We then examine whether corres...

Formal kinship foster care is an increasingly common form of out-of-home placement, and several important distinctions between kinship care and non-relative foster care have been identified. The present study evaluated the behavior of kinship foster children in comparison to non-relative foster children and children in the general population. A geo...

We present information with implications for the design of comprehensive systems of care for children with severe emotional disturbance and their families. Combining quantitative data derived from children and caregivers on multiple standardized assessments and qualitative data based on the caregivers' personal comments, we provide a detailed accou...

This article examines the use of student debates to promote substantive knowledge and policy practice skills. The authors present a pedagogical rationale for student debates, describe the incorporation of debates into a child welfare policy course, and report the results of an evaluation. Students demonstrated significantly greater increases in sel...

Using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), we analyzed individual developmental trajectories of disruptive behavior problems between ages 3.5 to 6.0 years for 183 children of adolescent mothers. We examined how the level of problem behavior (intercept) and the rate of change over time (slope) are influenced by child's sex, mother's depression/anxiet...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000 In this study, the role of mother-child attachment in the origin of early childhood problem behaviors was examined with reference to developmental context. Greenberg and colleagues (Greenberg, 1999; Greenberg, Speltz, & DeKlyen, 1993) have emphasized the interaction of attachment with three domains of...