Youth in underserved, urban communities are at risk for a range of negative outcomes related to stress, including social-emotional difficulties, behavior problems, and poor academic performance. Mindfulness-based approaches may improve adjustment among chronically stressed and disadvantaged youth by enhancing self-regulatory capacities. This paper reports findings from a pilot randomized controlled trial assessing the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary outcomes of a school-based mindfulness and yoga intervention. Four urban public schools were randomized to an intervention or wait-list control condition (n=97 fourth and fifth graders, 60.8% female). It was hypothesized that the 12-week intervention would reduce involuntary stress responses and improve mental health outcomes and social adjustment. Stress responses, depressive symptoms, and peer relations were assessed at baseline and post-intervention. Findings suggest the intervention was attractive to students, teachers, and school administrators and that it had a positive impact on problematic responses to stress including rumination, intrusive thoughts, and emotional arousal.
Identifying factors relevant for successful implementation of school-based interventions is essential to ensure that programs are provided in an effective and engaging manner. The perspectives of two key stakeholders critical for identifying implementation barriers and facilitators – students and their classroom teachers – merit attention in this context and have rarely been explored using qualitative methods. This study reports qualitative perspectives of fifth and sixth grade participants and their teachers of a 16-week school-based mindfulness and yoga program in three public schools serving low-income urban communities. Four themes related to program implementation barriers and facilitators emerged: program delivery factors, program buy-in, implementer communication with teachers, and instructor qualities. Feedback from students and teachers is discussed in the context of informing implementation, adaptation, and future development of school-based mindfulness and yoga programming in urban settings.
Previous studies on school-based mindfulness and yoga programs have focused primarily on quantitative measurement of program outcomes. This study used qualitative data to investigate program content and skills that students remembered and applied in their daily lives. Data were gathered following a 16-week mindfulness and yoga intervention delivered at three urban schools by a community non-profit organization. We conducted focus groups and interviews with nine classroom teachers who did not participate in the program and held six focus groups with 22 fifth and sixth grade program participants. This study addresses two primary research questions: (1) What skills did students learn, retain, and utilize outside the program? and (2) What changes did classroom teachers expect and observe among program recipients? Four major themes related to skill learning and application emerged as follows: (1) youths retained and utilized program skills involving breath work and poses; (2) knowledge about health benefits of these techniques promoted self-utilization and sharing of skills; (3) youths developed keener emotional appraisal that, coupled with new and improved emotional regulation skills, helped de-escalate negative emotions, promote calm, and reduce stress; and (4) youths and teachers reported realistic and optimistic expectations for future impact of acquired program skills. We discuss implications of these findings for guiding future research and practice.
Objective-We tested whether conduct problems moderate the relation between negative mood and drinking in adolescents as consistent with either a self-medication or a drinking consequences model. Method-The sample included 75 rising ninth graders who completed a two-stage, multi-method, multi-reporter study. We used experience sampling to assess negative mood and drinking over 21 days and Hierarchical Linear Modeling to test our hypotheses.Results-Counter to predictions, both self-medication and drinking consequence mechanisms were only evident in youth with fewer conduct problems.Conclusions-Findings provide support for the importance of considering multiple mechanisms as underlying the relation between negative mood and drinking as pertaining to sub-populations of vulnerable youth. Implications for prevention and understanding negative mood-drinking relations in adolescents are discussed.The relation between negative mood and drinking continues to cultivate notable interest, despite mounting evidence that the two are only weakly associated (Baker, Piper, McCarthy, Majeskie, & Fiore, 2004). Current approaches to testing this relation may in part explain why stronger effects have not been reported, particularly in adolescents. First, few studies consider alternative mechanisms to self-medication in testing the relation between negative mood and drinking even though such alternatives may be equally powerful in explaining this association (Hussong, Hicks, Levy & Curran, 2001). Second, cross-sectional and long-term prospective research designs used in studies supporting self-medication in adolescents are poorly suited to tests of this mechanism. Whereas studies of adults have used more temporally consistent experience sampling methods (ESM) to examine short-term covariation between mood and drinking (Hussong et al., 2001;Park, Armeli, & Tennen, 2004), no studies have used such methods to test this relation in adolescents. Third, many studies continue to test the main effect of negative mood on adolescent drinking, even though current formulations emphasize individual differences in vulnerability to selfmedication (e.g., Cooper, Frone, Russell & Mudar, 1995;Cooper, Russell, Skinner, Frone & Mudar, 1992;Kushner, Sher, Wood & Wood, 1994). In the current study, we addressed these three limitations by testing whether conduct problems moderate the relation between daily negative mood and adolescent drinking through either a self-medication (in which negative mood leads to drinking) or drinking consequences (in which drinking leads to negative mood) model. Mechanisms underlying negative mood-drinking relationsEvidence for a weak but consistent prediction of drinking from negative affect (i.e., more stable patterns of negative mood), internalizing symptoms and depression in adolescents is often interpreted as support for a self-medication process in youth (e.g., Halfors, Waller, Bauer, Ford, & Halpern, 2005;Tschann, Adler, Irwin, Millstein et al., 1994). The methods used by these studies test inter-individual diffe...
As school-based mindfulness and yoga programs gain popularity, the systematic study of fidelity of program implementation (FOI) is critical to provide a more robust understanding of the core components of mindfulness and yoga interventions, their potential to improve specified teacher and student outcomes, and our ability to implement these programs consistently and effectively. This paper reviews the current state of the science with respect to inclusion and reporting of FOI in peer-reviewed studies examining the effects of school-based mindfulness and/or yoga programs targeting students and/or teachers implemented in grades kindergarten through twelve (K-12) in North America. Electronic searches in PsychInfo and Web of Science from their inception through May 2014, in addition to hand searches of relevant review articles, identified 312 publications, 48 of which met inclusion criteria. Findings indicated a relative paucity of rigorous FOI. Fewer than 10% of studies outlined potential core program components or referenced a formal theory of action, and fewer than 20% assessed any aspect of FOI beyond participant dosage. The emerging nature of the evidence base provides a critical window of opportunity to grapple with key issues relevant to FOI of mindfulness-based and yoga programs, including identifying essential elements of these programs that should be faithfully implemented and how we might develop rigorous measures to accurately capture them. Consideration of these questions and suggested next steps are intended to help advance the emerging field of school-based mindfulness and yoga interventions.
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