Measuring beliefs about the malleability of mindfulness skills: Validation of the Turkish version of the mindfulness mindset scale.

Abstract

Mindfulness-based interventions produce uneven benefits across individuals, and one underexamined source of this variation is whether people believe mindfulness skills can be trained or are essentially fixed. The Mindfulness Mindset Scale (MMS) was developed to measure this belief, but it has not been examined in Turkish-speaking samples. This study adapted the MMS into Turkish through forward-backward translation, expert review, and pilot testing. A total of 532 Turkish undergraduates then completed the Turkish MMS together with additional measures used to examine its construct validity. Psychometric evidence was examined at both the scale and item levels using classical test theory and item response theory. The scale was primarily unidimensional once the shared variance between two attention items was accounted for, and internal consistency was acceptable. Items differed in how sharply they separated respondents, and the scale measured most precisely at moderate levels of the belief. The scale functioned similarly for women and men, with no evidence of item bias, although the small male subsample limits this conclusion. Scores were modestly related to a fixed creativity mindset but showed little relation to trait mindfulness or general distress, suggesting that the MMS captures a distinct belief about trainability. The Turkish MMS addresses a measurement gap in the cross-cultural study of mindfulness mindsets and provides researchers in Türkiye with a brief instrument for examining how beliefs about trainability relate to engagement and other practice-related outcomes. The present findings provide initial psychometric support for the Turkish MMS, although the scope of this evidence is limited by the characteristics of the study sample.