Development and Validation of Guided Meditations for Anger Management in Secondary School Children

Abstract

Background: Diverse concepts of meditations are dealt in the Indian traditional texts which aim at establishing peace and harmony within.Meditations, known for their phenomenal benefits, have made a strong presence as an alternative/ complementary/ adjunct therapy for prevention and management of many mental health conditions.While there are plenty of studies on the benefits of meditations, no studies are cited documenting the process of development and validation of meditations.Further, meditations as a program for anger management is less explored.Hence the present work focuses on developing short, guided meditations for anger management and documenting the process of its development and validation. Methods:The development process involved two steps i.e., construction and validation.Construction part included deriving the concepts of anger management from the Indian classical texts, structuring, and then composing the meditations.Validation part included pilot administration (n-5 adolescents) and expert validation (14 experts).Experts' ratings were analysed using content validation ratio (CVR) technique.Further, the developed meditations were part of the validated yoga module for anger management which was used in a separate study with a sample size of 189.A few relevant findings of those studies are cited in this paper to support further validation of the meditations.Results: Participants understood the guided meditations and were able to completely follow it in the pilot administration.CVR ratio for meditation techniques scored 0.71 as against the 0.51 qualifying value.Significant reduction of anger is observed in studies using the developed meditations as a part of yoga module.Conclusion: Short guided meditations are effective in management of anger among adolescents in the school setting.