Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills (KIMS): Assessing Suitability and Utility for Indian Students

Mindfulness has become a buzz word in recent times and there happens to be an expansion in the number of empirical studies involving the construct. Most of the mindfulness research has followed meditational experiences and has been seen through an interventional lens, especially in an Indian context. However, none of the attempts have highlighted and checked for the suitability of the mindfulness measures utilized in these sporadic attempts. In a bid to help Indian researchers use mindfulness assessment procedures, we assess the suitability and utility of a significant tool called Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness (KIMS). Owing to its ubiquitous cultural invariance in measuring mindfulness among lay population and that too without the experience of mindfulness meditation, it was selected for this cultural check. KIMS as a 39-item self report inventory measures four essential mindfulness skills: observing, describing, acting with awareness and accepting (or allowing) without judgement through scales designed for each of these skills. Data was collected from N=200 undergraduate students from our institution. Results suggests with certain caveats that KIMS inventory possess satisfactory content validity, internal consistency, test-retest reliability and a clear factor structure. These results are positive indicators of the fact that this self report inventory can be further tested with different sections of Indian population to assess its suitability, utility and ubiquity.