“Those Bridges That Help You Get There”: How Natural Mentors Improve Social Support and Social Capital of Unaccompanied Immigrant Youths Leaving Residential Care

ABSTRACT

The increasing arrival of unaccompanied immigrant youth to Europe has been challenging for established political and social interventions. A range of social and educational services have been developed to help young immigrants in their transition to adulthood and these programmes are often spaces where they can meet supportive adults. Twenty semi-structured interviews with unaccompanied immigrant youth residing in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area were carried out. This qualitative study explores the prevalence and role of natural mentors in their lives. Furthermore, we go deeper into the functions and dynamics developed through two relationships where young people shared in-depth explanations of their meaning for their lives. Our findings suggest that natural mentors provide various types of social support and social capital, which fulfil the emotional or educational needs of young people. Facilities and obstacles for building natural mentoring relationships are presented in order to provide social and political implications. We conclude that there is a need for providing services to reinforce or promote natural mentoring relationships for unaccompanied immigrant youth leaving residential care.

KEYWORDS:

• Natural mentors
• young immigrants
• social support
• social capital
• psychosocial development
• educational opportunities

Acknowledgments

We thank all participants for taking part in the interviews. We appreciate all those who were involved with study recruitment and data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Ethics Approval Statement

The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Institutional Review Board (or Ethics Committee of the [Anonymised for review]) under the code: CEBRU0001–2018 (6 April 2018).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the RECERCAIXA research fund (Recercaixa 2018–2021 UdG).