ABSTRACT
Mentoring, as we have seen, can have an impact on the lives of highly disaffected young people. But, how do individuals change? This is an important, yet deceptively simple, question, with no obviously satisfactory answer. While interventions targeting disaffected young people invariably aim to bring about some changes in their circumstances or behaviour, the mechanisms by which such changes are expected to occur often remain obscure. In this sense, work with disaffected young people may be considered to be under-theorized. That is to say, there is often little explicit discussion of the aims of the particular programme, beyond the most banal identification of ‘reductions in offending’ or something similarly general and this lack of clarity is then compounded by the absence of any explicit model of change. Why is it that a particular intervention might be thought to work? And, by what means might it be expected to change participants’ behaviour? These are fundamental questions which often remain unanswered and are, indeed, often unasked.
