Psychometric proprieties of Spanish version of Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS)

Abstract

The Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) is a brief and easy to administer scale that mainly assesses the individual’s dispositional capacity to be aware and conscious in day-to-day life experiences. This is a 15-item self-reported single-factor scale that is exclusively focused on attention/awareness component of mindfulness construct. The instrument can be independently used to assess individuals either with or without meditation experience and has been widely used in mindfulness research. In order to establish the psychometric proprieties of the MAAS a total of 385 individuals were assessed. 201 individuals came from a clinical sample and 184 control individuals were university students. The MAAS showed good psychometric proprieties in terms of validity and reliability. The scale obtained an adequate convergent validity with the Five Facets Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) and good discriminating validity with relation to depressive symptoms. Additionally, the MAAS obtained good reliability indexes (Cronbach’s α = 0.89), good temporal stability and adequately replicates the original single-factor structure accounting for 42.8% of the total variance. These results were comparable to those obtained by the original English version of the scale. MAAS can be briefly administered and enables us to measure the individual's frequency of mindfulness states in daily life and can be used both on clinical research and healthy subjects.