Moving to Mindful: Reducing Stress and Anxiety in High-Risk Teens using a Mindfulness Intervention

Methods

Summary

We will recruit teens from high-conflict homes through the Colorado State University Center for Family & Couple Therapy (http://www.cfct.chhs.colostate...). They run multiple programs for community youth who are frequently from high-conflict homes, and are an ideal recruitment site for this project. 

To determine whether increasing mindfulness decreases stress-regulatory problems for adolescents from high-conflict homes, we will assess stress and regulation three time: at baseline (before the intervention), after adolescents experience an evidence-based and developmentally sensitive mindfulness intervention called Learning to Breathe, and then again three months after the intervention has ended. The post-intervention follow-up period will be critical to demonstrate that potential benefits of the mindfulness intervention persist.

Challenges

Recruitment and retention of participants are possible challenges. To overcome these challenges, we have allocated money in the budget to support staff time to both of these efforts. In addition, we are targeting a recruitment site that should facilitate successful recruitment. We have proposed to recruit 30 youth from high-conflict homes, and Center records estimate 215 families can be targeted for recruitment per year. If recruitment were slow, we would use extensive connections to local therapists to recruit from a broader clinic community base. For instance, over 80 local therapists are graduates of the Center’s Marriage & Family Therapy program.

Pre Analysis Plan

We plan to use repeated-measures ANOVA to examine change in outcomes from pre-test to post-test and follow-up, controlling for potentially important demographic characteristics.