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Commentaries
Hyland, Lee, and Mills (2015) specified the two most popular scales for mindfulness: the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory (FMI; 30 items, Buchheld, Grossman, & Walach, 2001; 14 items, Walach, Buchheld, Buttenmüller, Kleinknecht, & Schmidt, 2006) and the Mindfulness Attention and Awareness Scale (MAAS; Brown & Ryan, 2003). However, the popularity of these measures does not necessarily mean that they are of high quality. Especially considering the complex epistemology and ontology of the mindfulness construct, we should apply mindfulness assessments with caution. More specially, according to item development theorists in the industrial and organizational (I-O) area (see Hinkin, 1998; Hinkin & Tracey, 1999; Kerlinger & Lee, 2000; Schriesheim, Powers, Scandura, Gardiner, & Lankau, 1993), scholars must select measures that have (a) a clear operational definition; (b) alignment between definition and measure (content validity); (c) high reliability and (d) high construct validity; and (e) high criterion-related validity. However, it is not clear which of the available mindfulness assessments satisfies these criteria and to what extent. In this commentary, we assess currently used measures based on these criteria and provide directions for future research.
There have been 11 mindfulness measures published to date, 3 of which we excluded here because of their infrequent use (citations in Google Scholar less than 30), including the Development Mindfulness Survey (Solloway & Fisher, 2007), the Effects of Meditation Scale (Reavley & Pallant, 2009), and the Langer Mindfulness/Mindlessness Scale (Haigh, Moore, Kashdan, & Fresco, 2011). Hence in this commentary, we focus on the eight measures presented in Table 1: MAAS, FMI (14 items),1the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills (KIMS; Baer, Smith, & Allen, 2004), the Toronto Mindfulness Scale (TMS; Lau et al., 2006), the Five Facets Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ; Baer, Smith, Hopkins, Krietemeyer, & Toney, 2006), the revised Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale (CAMS; Feldman, Hayes, Kumar, Greeson, & Laurenceau, 2007), the Southampton Mindfulness Questionnaire (SMQ; Chadwick et al., 2008), and the Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale (PHLMS; Cardaciotto, Herbert, Forman, Moitra, & Farrow, 2008). We first elaborate on our specified standards, then apply these standards to assess established mindfulness measures, and finally provide our evaluation results. Table 2 summarizes the results of our assessment.
Table 1.
Mindfulness Measures
Name of measure | Google Scholar citations (as of June 7, 2015) | Trait or state |