Examining Adolescents' Beliefs About Meditation: A Mixed Methods Study Using the Reasoned Action Approach

Abstract

Self-regulation is an important capacity for young people to develop in order to improve both health and academic outcomes. Recent research on meditation with adolescents has shown that the behavior can promote self-regulation and positively impact the self-regulatory regions of the adolescent brain. Currently, very few young people meditate and the beliefs held by adolescents about meditation which would be necessary to understand in order to help them adopt the behavior are unknown. The purpose of this study was to examine adolescents’ beliefs about meditation and the impact these beliefs have on their intention to meditate. High school students completed questions both open-ended and closed-ended assessing their beliefs about meditation based on constructs from the Reasoned Action Approach (RAA). Multiple regression analysis was conducted to examine the impact attitudes, perceived norm, perceived behavioral control had on their intention to meditate while controlling for demographic variables. A content and frequency analysis was conducted on the open-ended questions to determine the salient or top-of-the-mind beliefs held by adolescents about trying to meditate at least twice in the next week. Attitude and perceived norm were the only two constructs statistically significantly associated with intention to meditate. Students believed that meditation could reduce their stress and help them relax but may take time and could slow them down. Students also believed that their family and friends would approve of them meditating and no one would disapprove. Finally, participants believed that taking time and limiting distractions would enable them to meditate. Health professionals interested in helping young people acquire the health-enhancing behavior of meditation to promote self-regulation can do so by changing adolescents’ attitudes towards the behavior, helping them to see that other youth meditate, and that others would approve of them trying to meditate.