Mentoring and early years practitioners: Investigating the influence of higher education qualifications and social support

• Main Author: Torbjørn Waaland
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2017-01-01
• Series: Cogent Education
• Subjects: social support; mentoring provided; higher education; confirmatory factor analysis; structural equation modeling
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2017.1415630

The main purpose of this article is to study the influence of social support on mentoring provided and the moderating influence of having a higher education. This cross-sectional survey was based on a questionnaire that was sent to 435 employees from 29 preschools in Norway. A total of 284 responses were returned, a response rate of 65.3%. Three research hypotheses were formulated in order to answer three research questions. Confirmatory Factor Analysis was used to develop three measurement models and Structural Equation Modeling based on multi-group analysis was used to test the hypotheses. The results revealed that social support increase the occurrence of mentoring provided at work for employees with a higher education and that having a higher education moderates this relationship as compared to those without that education. Implications for practice, higher education, and the use of convenience sampling and self-reports are discussed, especially related to representativeness and reporting biases. This is an understudied area and no previous research has used a confirmatory approach to investigate how social support and higher education influence the occurrence of mentoring provided.