Exploring Ethnocultural Empathy and Cultural Attunement in Youth Mentoring: A Multi-Method Study

This multi-method study explored volunteer mentors’ ethnocultural empathy and cultural attunement. Ethnocultural empathy involves understanding and responding to another’s racial/ethnic experiences, and attunement includes a behavioral response that prioritizes the other’s needs. Cultural attunement combines these interpersonal skills, requiring a critical self-reflection of one’s emotional responses and perceived ability to communicate about another’s racial experiences, and a corresponding behavioral response. This study examined the relationship between ethnocultural empathy and attunement and what cultural attunement and misattunement look like in youth mentoring relationships. Among 235 mentors, quantitative findings showed that initial ethnocultural empathy did not directly predict later attunement, but higher initial ethnocultural empathy did strengthen the association between later ethnocultural empathy and attunement. Qualitative analyses identified key components of cultural attunement and misattunement and explored patterns in how mentors’ cultural attunement and misattunement changed over time. These findings highlight the evolving nature of mentors’ interpersonal skills related to racial/ethnic experiences and offer insights for training and interventions to best support mentees’ racialized experiences.