THE DEVELOPMENTS OF MINDFULNESS INVENTORY SCALE AND MINDFULNESS ENHANCEMENT PROGRAM FOR EIGHT-TO ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN

Abstract

This dissertation consisted of two studies following the two main purposes. That is (1) developing the Mindfulness Inventory for Children (MIC) and (2) developing the Mindfulness Enhancement Program for 8- to 11-year-old children (MEP). Three groups of participants; that is, 7- to 12-year-old children, their parents, and Buddhist teachers were interviewed in the first study. Their information from interviews, literatures, and related theories were used for developing the MIC in the context of Thai-Buddhist. Results from interviews and literatures revealed that mindfulness in Thai Buddhist context consisted of the two main components; “awareness” and “acceptance”. Then, these two components were used for developing of the three versions of MIC: the Children-Report scale, the Parent-Report scale for evaluating children’s mindfulness-based behaviors at home, and the Teacher-Report scale for assessing the children’s behaviors at school. The MIC was validated by multitrait-multimethod. The MEP was developed in the second study based on the Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for Children (MBCT-C). To be appropriate for Thai children, the MEP was adjusted many times after the pilot study with the same age children. Then, final version of MEP was used in this study with 68 children, aged 8- to 11-year-old. They were randomly assigned into the experimental or control groups. All of them participated in the study for eight weeks and completed the MIC-Children Report, a short version of the Children Depressive Inventory (CDI), and the Analyses of Emotions Subscale of the Emotion Awareness Questionnaire (EAQ-30) for five times during the study. In addition to attending the MEP at school, children in the experimental group were asked to do a series of 30 homework throughout the study. In the first study, the results indicated that the MIC is a psychometrically sound measure. It is a good scale for evaluating mindfulness skills in children in Buddhist Thai context. (1) All three versions of the MIC had a construct validity. The results showed that the scores of “awareness” component and “acceptance” component scores within the three versions had a significantly positive correlation at a .01 level (children-reported = .64, parent-reported = .69, and teacher-reported = .54. (2) The MIC-Children Report had a convergent validity. The results showed that the MIC-Children Report had the significantly positive correlations with the MIC-Parent Report (r = .18, p < .05) and with the MIC-Teacher Report (r = .18, p < .05). (3) The MIC-Children Report had a concurrent validity. The results showed that the scores of the MIC-Children Report had significantly positive correlations with the scores of attending to other’s emotions (r = .14, p < .05), analyses emotions (r = .23, p < .05), opening to new experience (r = .20, p < .05) and had a significantly negative correlation with depression score (r = -.24, p < .05). (4) All three versions of the MIC had high reliability. That is, Cronbach’s alpha for the MIC-Children Report was .88, the MIC-Parent Report was .83, and for the MIC-Teacher Report was .83. In the second study, the results indicated that the MEP had the good outcomes for children, obviously. The results showed that after attending the MEP children in the experimental group had a significantly higher mindfulness score and lower depression score than before attending the program (p < .017; using Bonferroni correction). Moreover, they also had significantly higher mindfulness scores and lower depression scores than children in the control group (p < .017; using Bonferroni correction).