A brief mindfulness education program for social work students

Mindfulness has recently been a notably hot topic for social work discipline. Many social work academics are increasingly considering integrating these programs into the social work curriculum; however, many see such programs time-consuming and difficult to integrate into social work crowded curriculum, consequently proposing shorter versions. This doctoral thesis aimed to design a brief mindfulness-based education program for social work students and to examine its effectiveness. The study used a quantitative approach, with a quasi-experimental pre-test post-test study design, to examine the program's effectiveness in two separate modules of traditional classroom-based and online programs. The study's participants were 101 third-year undergraduate social work students studying at Hacettepe University. Thirty-two and 27 students respectively comprised the intervention and waitlist control groups of the traditional classroom-based mindfulness module, and 23 and 19 students the online module. A personal questionnaire, Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21), Self-Compassion Scale (SCS), Ruminative Thought Style Scale (RTS), Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS), and The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) were utilized on the intervention and waitlist control groups before and after the intervention. The Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was applied to examine whether the intervention groups reported better results on each variable regarding the measures, after the brief mindfulness intervention. Moreover, multiple mediation analyses were utilized to find out about the possible working mechanisms of the intervention. The results indicated that the brief mindfulness program, in both modules similarly, could make statistically significant improvements in the students' psychological health; however, not in their therapeutic relationship. Mediation analyses showed that adjusting trait mindfulness, rumination, and self-compassion were the possible working mechanisms of the program. Therefore, this brief mindfulness program can be used as an effective and introductory mindfulness program for undergraduate social work students in either classroom-based or online modules; nevertheless, more research is recommended.