Meditation as an Intervention for Health: A Framework for Understanding Meditation Research

A new framework for describing meditation interventions aims to improve scientific rigor in research and clinical practice. The framework distinguishes seven essential components: the individual, object, experience, immediate effects, approach (foundation and source), outcome (intended goals and longer-term effects), and engagement (duration, spacing, frequency, and quality of attention). The authors argue that the lack of a consistent framework has hindered study design, interpretation, and comparison across research. Examples are provided from Yoga Therapy and published research. The goal is to start a dialogue with experts in other meditation traditions to adapt and respond to the proposed framework.

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Abstract

We propose a framework for understanding meditation that can support greater scientific rigor in reporting meditation research, and selecting meditation health interventions. There is no consistent and thorough framework for describing meditation research interventions. This impedes rigor of meditation research design and interpretation of findings. This also limits meaningful comparisons across research studies. The audience for this article includes researchers, meditation experts, healthcare professionals, and those with interest in meditation. The framework describes the key components of a meditation intervention. We also discuss how meditation can effect individuals differently, and provide suggestions for describing the qualifications of the expert who designed the meditations in an intervention. The meditation framework supports (1) comparing different meditation interventions, and (2) understanding how meditation interventions lead to outcomes. We provide examples from a Yoga Therapy perspective of meditation (our domain of expertise), and from published research on meditation to illustrate applications of the meditation framework. The meditation framework provides a way of characterizing meditation interventions by distinguishing seven essential components. The first four components describe the meditation session (individual, object, experience, and immediate effects). Approach describes the foundation and source of a meditation practice. The outcome component represents both intended goals or reasons for prescribing the meditation intervention and other longer term effects that may occur. The engagement component refers to duration, spacing and frequency of doing the practice and quality of attention. These seven components can be applied to any type of meditation intervention. We explain the components of the framework and then offer examples. Our goal is to express the importance of having a framework for describing components of meditation across systems of knowledge and methods of application. We hope this article begins a dialogue with experts in other forms of meditation interventions, as they apply, adapt and respond to the proposed framework.