The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 3 - 58

Sherry L. Early

sionals would serve as positive predictors of
RAs' mentoring outcomes and leadership capacity scores. Resident assistants with student
affairs mentors reported higher group mean
scores on both mentoring outcomes than did
those with any other type of most significant
mentor. ANOVA findings revealed a main
effect of the most significant type of mentor
and mentoring for personal development and
mentoring for leadership empowerment. Regression analyses included the finding that
student affairs mentors significantly predicted

Housing and residence life
administrators should strive
to interact frequently in both
informal and formal capacities
with resident assistants.

mentoring outcomes for personal development and for leadership empowerment. Posthoc analyses on mentoring outcomes revealed
that RAs with student affairs mentors reported
significantly higher scores on both mentoring
outcomes than did RAs who identified faculty,
employer, or other student as their mentors.
Therefore, student affairs mentors significantly differed from faculty, employers, and other
students on both mentoring outcomes.
With larger sample sizes there may be
statistical significance, but not practical sig-

nificance; therefore, it is important to examine
effect size in addition to significance. The
effect size measures the size of the difference between two groups and is a measure
of the practical significance of the difference
(Coe, 2002). The effect size or Cohen's d is
the difference between the means divided by
the standard deviation. Two groups' means
should differ by at least .2 standard deviations
or more. Cohen (1988) stated d = .2 for a small
effect size, d = .5 for a medium effect, and d = .8
for a large effect. The values for Cohen's d are
reported in Table 1. For all variables the effect
sizes are not large; however, the group means
differed by at least .2 standard deviations, and
the differences ranged from small to medium.
The findings indicated that mentored resident assistants had significantly higher scores
than did non-mentored resident assistants on
all dependent variables, including leadership
capacity (socially responsible leadership and
leadership efficacy). This suggests that mentored resident assistants demonstrate higher
leadership capacities than do non-mentored
resident assistants.
The leadership capacity (socially responsible leadership and leadership efficacy) results
were that the type of mentor is not a predictor of socially responsible leadership. Therefore, having a faculty member, an employer,
or another student as a mentor does not differ
from having a student affairs mentor when
considering the effect on socially responsible
leadership competencies. Pertaining to leadership efficacy, significant findings suggest that
other students emerged as negative predictors
of leadership efficacy in comparison to student
affairs mentors. Therefore, RAs with student
affairs mentors are predicted to exhibit higher

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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 3

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