The relevance of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire according to the views of experienced meditators in India.

Abstract

Despite the interest in mindfulness research, there is a dearth of studies about mindfulness assessment in India. Particularly, little is known about the extent to which the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) represents content relevant for experienced meditators in Indian cultural and spiritual contexts. A sequential explanatory mixed-method design was used for this study. Six experienced meditators completed the standard FFMQ along with corresponding perceived importance items, followed by retrospective cognitive interviews. In addition to quantitative analysis related to reliability, content validity, and agreement, qualitative data from cognitive interviews were used to explore the reasons for high and low ratings of some items. Most of the items on the FFMQ facets act with awareness (75%), and nonreact (85.7%) were rated by all participants as being important. For 87.5% of the items in the describe facet, there was moderate agreement among the meditators regarding their importance. Only one out of eight items in each of the observe and nonjudge facets were rated as important by all participants. The qualitative statements supported the quantitative results by throwing some light on the reasons for high and low agreement. The observe and nonjudge facets were found to have questionable content validity for use with meditators in India who are non-Buddhist and also do not practice in mindfulness-based interventions contexts. Future psychometric work in India will need to explore to what extent a shortened version, excluding the low validity items of the FFMQ, may be a suitable alternative. This article was published Online First November 30, 2023. Kalpana Raman https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4656-5926 Brief results (percentages of agreement) from this study without presentation of any direct verbatims of the participants were presented in the International Conference of Mindfulness-Melbourne, Australia in 2022. No further dissemination of results has occurred thereafter except for this journal. The importance data are shown in Table 2, which is the central data for this study. But, further demographic data, the actual FFMQ data, and the qualitative transcripts are not provided due to ethical reasons. The authors would like to thank all the participants and the meditation organizations for their participation in this study. The authors did not receive any funding for this study. Ethics approval was sought from Auckland University of Technology Ethics Committee (21/297) on December 13, 2021. The authors declare that there is no conflicts of interest.Kalpana Raman served as lead for conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, and writing-original draft. Richard J. Siegert contributed equally to supervision. Christian U. Krägeloh served as lead for supervision and served in a supporting role for formal analysis. Kalpana Raman, Richard J. Siegert, and Christian U. Krägeloh contributed equally to writing-review and editing.