Implementing Mindfulness-Based Interventions is Schools: What Brazil can learn from United Kingdom experience?

• Grant number: 18/14264-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: January 21, 2019
• End date: December 29, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Collective Health - Preventive Medicine
• Principal Investigator: Emérita Sátiro Opaleye
• Grantee: Emérita Sátiro Opaleye
• Host Investigator: Willem Kuyken
• Host Institution: Escola Paulista de Medicina (EPM). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus São Paulo. São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Oxford, England
• Associated research grant: 15/19472-5 - Innovative interventions related to alcohol consumption problems in Brazil: search for new approaches aimed at an old public health issue, AP.TEM

Abstract

Mindfulness training studies for children and adolescents are still incipient, but there is encouraging evidence for the potential of Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBI), especially in the educational context, for a range of benefits for children and adolescents, increasing well-being, physical, psychological, emotional and social outcomes and reducing stress, anxiety, reactivity and bad behavior. Likewise, research shows the potential for mindfulness to improve cognitive performance and executive functions, helping adolescents to pay more attention, focus more, think more innovatively, increasing working memory and decision-making planning, improving social-emotional skills that facilitate learning. Equally encouraging are the indicatives that these interventions are easy, inexpensive and well accepted by students and teachers, and it is feasible to apply them in an educational context.However, there is still a gap on how such interventions should be implemented in the "real life" of schools to ensure effectiveness, including existing challenges and strategies to overcome them.With this in mind, the present proposal aims to provide and describe the parameters necessary for the implementation of an MBI in schools in the United Kingdom, as well as the organization of this information in a manual to promote the implementation of these interventions in other contexts. This project is nested in a large randomized controlled trial (MYRIAD) that verifies the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of an MBI in schools, from the University of Oxford, UK.The methodology of mixed methods will be used to combine quantitative and qualitative data collected in different stages of the implementation process, from the selection and training of teachers to monitoring the application of the intervention in the classroom. The data will be collected by the research team of MYRIAD. Thematic analysis will be used to identify key components of an MBI implementation of qualitative data and combination with descriptive quantitative analysis. The development of a manual for implementing MBIs in schools will be useful for application in other contexts, such as the Brazilian for example, due to the lack of existing materials for this purpose.As a complementary activity, a cross-sectional data analysis of the MYRIAD baseline will be performed to verify the association between psychiatric symptoms and substance use, identifying the role of the mindfulness trait in this relationship. Our hypothesis is that the mindfulness trait will weaken the relationship between psychiatric symptoms and substance use in students. Being a skill that can be trained through an MBI, identifying the role of mindfulness in this relationship encourages studies on how an MBI can act on adolescent substance use behavior.