Preferred Name
Mandi
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Date of Graduation
Summer 2018
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)
Department
Department of Graduate Psychology
Advisor(s)
Gregg Henriques
Abstract
Dramatic rises in levels of anxiety, stress, and depression in college students have been observed over the past decade and is so pervasive that it has been deemed the College Student Mental Health Crisis (CSMHC). A number of experts have argued that much of this crisis can be attributed to students’ overall lack of basic knowledge of emotions and adaptive emotional processing. To address this problem, this study sought out to develop a brief mindfulness workshop as an intervention for college students to help increase student well-being, decrease anxious and depressive symptomology, and allow for material to be easily internalized. In this study, 67 total participants, all of whom were college students at James Madison University, completed a mindfulness workshop entitled, From Critical to CALM: A Guided Mindfulness Workshop. Stages of this study included the following: 1) Participant recruitment; 2) Conduct the pre-intervention assessment of participants using the Henriques-10 Well-Being Questionnaire (H10WB), the CORE Outcome Measure (CORE-OM), and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item (GAD-7) scale; 3) Conduct the workshop; 4) directly after each workshop, administer a brief “Quiz” to assess the knowledge participants obtained as well as a satisfaction survey; and 5) Conduct the post-intervention assessment of all remaining participants using the same pre-intervention measures along with one qualitative question asking participants to indicate what concept(s)/idea(s) from the workshop they remember learning. Students’ satisfaction of the workshop overall was high and the vast majority of them reported that they would likely use the workshop’s strategies in the future. Two to three weeks after the workshop, students also retained at least some of the key knowledge elements from the workshop. Test-retest results for this study found statistically signficant change in students’ well-being, as indicated by the H10WB. A positive trend on the GAD was also found, but there was no change found on the CORE-OM. Due to the limitations of this study, the results are not able to be effectively interpreted to determine causation. However, given the nature and brief time of the intervention, these results were deemed as encouraging. Further development of the workshop and adjustments to the study will need to be performed to determine if, indeed, the workshop may have succeeded in initiating improvement in well-being, potentially through facilitating mindful awareness of intrapsychic process.
Recommended Citation
Quay, Mandi Eggenberger and Quay, Mandi, "From critical to CALM: The development and implementation of a brief unified mindfulness workshop for college students" (2018). Dissertations, 2014-2019. 185.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/diss201019/185
