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

Abstract

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.