[The clinical significance of mindfulness: Hungarian adaptation of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire Short Form (FFMQ-SF-15)].

Abstract

Introduction: Mindfulness based interventions belongs to the third wave of cognitive behavioural therapies, where the focus is shifted from restructuring negative automatic thoughts and dysfunctional attitudes to the awareness and acceptance of mental events. The effectiveness of mindfulness based interventions also encouraged researchers to explore more precisely the mechanism of mindfulness. One of the most common measuring instruments is the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ). In recent years, several versions of the questionnaire have been developed, but so far no Hungarian sample has yet been used to assess which version is the most suitable for clinical and research use.

Objective: Hungarian adaptation and internal / external validity testing of the short version of FFMQ.

Method: In our cross-sectional, non-randomized study, we included 1413 patients from the psychotherapy outpatient clinic of our institution between 2018 and 2022.

Results: Compared to the original 39 items, the 15-item version of the FFMQ has better validity indicators. Based on the confirmatory factor analysis, the five-factor model shows an excellent fit. The internal and external reliability of the five-factor structure proved to be better, than the one-factor model. The correlation coefficients also are indicating, that the direction and strength of the relationship are equivalent for the examined variables.

Conclusions: The FFMQ-SF-15 version is a reliable and valid instrument for measuring mindfulness in a clinical sample.