View article

The paucity of mindfulness-based interventions and research in Estonia motivated the development of an Estonian Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS). Unlike most languages, the Estonian language lacks a distinctive present tense. This provides a potential challenge for assessing mindfulness, a psychological construct characterized by present-moment awareness. We outline the process of overcoming linguistic differences during translation. The Estonian MAAS showed a single-factor structure and strong internal consistency. A cross-cultural comparison showed factorial invariance between the Estonian and the original scale. In an Estonian adult student sample, MAAS scores were invariant across genders and education levels, positively related to subjective well-being and self-esteem and inversely related to public self-consciousness and social anxiety. Item response theory analyses (IRT …