Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Stress-Based Mindfulness Therapy on Academic Engagement and the Sense of Loneliness Among Junior High School Students Addicted to the Internet

Although the dramatic increase in Internet use has provided many facilities for people, it has also increased the rate of Internet addiction. Internet addiction is the unregulated use of the Internet that leads to the development of symptoms, such as cognitive and behavioral infatuation with the Internet. It can also cause many physical and physiological problems in adolescents, decrease the level of their academic engagement and increase their sense of loneliness. Therefore, psychological interventions are necessary to reduce these negative effects. The present study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of stress–based mindfulness therapy on academic engagement and the sense of loneliness among Junior high school students who were addicted to the Internet.

 This research was conducted through a quasi–experimental method with a pretest–posttest design and with a control group. The statistical population of the study included all Junior high school students in Birjand City, Iran, in the academic year 2019–2020. For sampling, based on the minimum sample size in experimental studies, out of 2753 students, 40 eligible volunteer students with a score less than 75 on the Academic Engagement Scale (Fredericks et al., 2004) and a score greater than 80 on the Loneliness Questionnaire (Asher et al., 1984) were included in the study by multi–stage cluster sampling method. At first, 3 schools were randomly selected in Birjand, then 2 classes were randomly selected from each school and next, 40 students were randomly selected from these two classes and assigned into the two study groups (20 people in the experimental group and 20 people in the control group). The duration of this training program was 8 sessions of 90 minutes for 4 weeks, which were performed from April 5 to May 5, 2020. During this period, the control group did not receive any training. The inclusion criteria were as follows: Internet addiction for at least one year, studying in junior high school, living in Birjand and having no restriction on attendance in training sessions, having a score of less than 75 on the Academic Engagement Scale (Fredericks et al., 2004), gaining a score of more than 80 on the Loneliness Questionnaire (Asher et al., 1984), not participating in the similar psychological interventions, and participating in all training sessions. The exclusion criteria were as follows: under another psychological interventions and more than 2 absences from training sessions. Descriptive (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (covariance analysis) were used for data analysis in SPSS version 20. A significance level of 0.05 was considered for all tests.

The results showed that stress–based mindfulness intervention had a significant effect on increasing academic engagement (p<0.001) and decreasing the sense of loneliness (p<0.001) in the posttest stage in the experimental group. The effect size of this intervention was 0.469 for academic engagement and 0.819 for a sense of loneliness.

According to the research findings, those Internet addicted students who suffer from academic engagement problems and a sense of loneliness may benefit from stress–based mindfulness intervention.