Critical issues in mentoring research

Introduction
Research into the activity of mentoring has grown at a significant rate in the last twenty years (Allen, Eby, O’Brien & Lentz, 2008; Janssen, Vuuren & Jong, 2015) as has the range of inter-disciplinary subjects associated with mentoring, such as business, education, entrepreneurship, nursing and psychology (De Four, Pegg & Beck, 2015; Kochan, 2013; Laukhuf & Malone, 2015; Underhill, 2006).
Allen et al.’s (2008) review of organizational mentoring literature – consisting of two hundred and seven individual research studies, published in sixty different journals acknowledged the growing interest and research on the topic of mentoring. The authors attributed this to the increasing recognition that formal and informal mentoring is associated with behavioral, attitudinal and career benefits for mentees and mentors (Allen et al., 2004; Eby et al., 2008; Ghosh & Reio, 2013). Additionally, over the last ten years there have been an increasing number of evaluations of mentoring research processes and practices (Allen et al., 2008; Bozeman & Feeney, 2007; Janssen, Vuuren & Jong, 2015; Kammeyer-Mueller & Judge, 2008; Underhill, 2006). A broad range of mentoring studies are explored in this chapter within the context of identifying the critical issues involved in assuring the quality of mentoring research.
Purpose and Overview
The aim of this chapter is to provide an in-depth analysis of the critical issues related to the quality of research processes and strategies used in contemporary inter-disciplinary scholarly literature in mentoring. Further, it seeks to expand researcher and practitioner perspectives about this issues that will ultimately enhance the research about and practice of mentoring.
The chapter begins with an outline of the process used to identify critical issues in assuring quality in mentoring research. This is followed by a discussion of each of the eight critical issues identified through this process, referring to specific studies that illustrate the degree to which quality is achieved. The final section posits the way ahead for mentoring research.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published as: Haddock-Millar, J. (2017). Critical issues in mentoring research. In The SAGE Handbook of mentoring, Clutterbuck, D., Kochan, F., Lunsford, L., Dominguez, N., & Haddock-Millar, J. (eds), (pp. 52-66). SAGE Publications Ltd. Copyright © 2017 (Chandana Sanyal). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications