Basic psychological need satisfaction of adolescents with a visual impairment: Effectiveness of a community-based mentoring program

Introduction: Psychosocial functioning of adolescents with a visual impairment can be negatively impacted due to vision related challenges experienced during the performance of daily living activities and participation in social activities. Within this randomized controlled trail, with a care-as-usual control group and two intervention-groups, the effectiveness of a mentoring program was investigated on improving psychosocial functioning of youth with a visual impairment. In addition, the potential positive effect of match similarity on the effectiveness of the program was tested by randomly assigning mentees to either a mentor with or without a visual impairment. Methods: A total of 76 adolescents (M age = 18 years, SD = 2.0, ranged between 15 and 22 years) and 36 mentors (M age = 30 years, SD = 5.9, ranged between 22 and 43 years), participated in the study. Baseline, post-test, and follow-up measurements were fitted to a multilevel growth model. Psychosocial functioning was assessed by measures of the three basic psychological needs (Chen et al., 2015), wellbeing, acceptance of the impairment, self-esteem, and loneliness. Results: Results showed that mentoring significantly improved autonomy satisfaction (B = 0.15, S.E. = 0.07, 95% CI = 0.003, 0.31, d. = .44) and competence satisfaction (B = 0.19, S.E. = 0.08, 95% CI = 0.02, 0.34, d. = .55). Mentoring had no effect on changes in relatedness satisfaction, wellbeing, acceptance of the impairment, self-esteem, and loneliness compared to the care-as-usual control group. No significant differences were found between mentees matched to mentors with or without a visual impairment for all outcomes. Conclusion: Mentoring appears a promising intervention to improve satisfaction with the basic psychological needs for autonomy and competence satisfaction among young people with a visual disability. However, the unexpected absence of effects on concomitant outcomes like relatedness satisfaction, wellbeing, acceptance of the impairment, self-esteem, and loneliness warrant caution regarding the potential for mentoring to support an adaptive transition to adulthood. The pattern of results also raises questions regarding the role of basic psychological need satisfaction as a mechanism for change in psychosocial functioning.