College Students Intentions To Practice Mindfulness Meditation Analysis

Several health problems can occur in one’s body if it is placed under too much stress, such as depression, fatigue, acne, and obesity. Studies have also shown that reducing stress lowers a person’s chances of developing a physical or mental illness. Carol Anne Rizer, Mary Helen Fagan, Carol Kilmon, and Linda Rath have studied undergraduate college students to determine if mindfulness meditation can help people become more aware of their stress, and to help cope. Their findings have been placed in The Role of Perceived Stress and Health Belief’s on College Students’ Intentions to Practice Mindfulness Meditation. Although this piece of work shows how knowledgeable the people who were involved in it are, some things could have been changed to
make it more informative. At a university in the southwest, 101 junior business undergraduates between the ages of 19 and 53 who were mostly male, were given the opportunity to receive extra credit by completing an anonymous questionnaire. This study used the Perceived Stress Scale, which was made to measure levels of stress. The scale assessed which events in the students’ lives were unbearable, uncontrollable, and unpredictable in the last month, as well as health risks associated with not meditating. This study’s authors then came up with another smaller scale that would ask questions about the students’ intentions to practice mindfulness meditation. The independent variable in this study was the questionnaire, the experimental group was the students, and the dependent variable was stress level scales of each student. The results in this study proved that the researchers went about their research the wrong way. Instead of telling about the risks of not meditating, they should have told the students what the benefits of meditating are. This study was done only on business undergraduate juniors who were almost all male, and that all went to the same college. The researchers may have had different results if more schools had been involved, and if the ratio between males and females had been closer. Males and females have different characteristics that can affect the amount of stress each gender feels. Lastly, the results of this study could have been swayed due to the fact of how large the age gap in the 101 students had. The students involved ranged from age 19, all the way to age 53. If the study had separated the students into groups based on age with a ten year age gap, the researchers could have been given different results.