Mindfulness and Online Music for Channeling Stress in Primary School Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Spain

Abstract

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared an international pandemic state of
emergency, in the face of the public health crisis caused by COVID-19. Since that day, Spaniards
have faced the situation of confinement in their homes, while sanitary containment measures have
restricted mobility, reducing economic and social activity, in addition to paralyzing productive
work in numerous sectors.
In these circumstances the scope of which cannot be predicted in all its consequences and
dimensions as of now, one of the most affected social sectors has been the population of children,
adolescents and young people. At this point, this sector has been affected in its educational work,
as well as in leisure time activities, having been deprived of the social interactions necessary for
the process of socialization and formation of personality.
Based on the aforementioned situation, when an important record was detected on the levels
of stress, anxiety and behavioral problems, it was seen fit to implement Mindfulness and Music
Education sessions online, with the main objective of channeling the problems of behavior, stress
and anxiety generated by confinement through an online methodology. The dynamics was studied
with primary school students in Madrid. In order to evaluate the impact of this interventional action,
a quasi-experimental design was structured from the methodological point of view, establishing the
application of Mindfulness and Online Music Education sessions as an independent variable, and
changes as a dependent variable, behavior, stress and anxiety. Next, an incidental non-probabilistic
sampling was established, with a total of 130 participants (77% girls and 23% boys), with the mean
age of the children of 9.407 (DT = 2.393), 100% of whom were Primary Education students.
The following social networks were used as tools for communication and socio-digital
interaction: WhatsApp, Zoom and Instagram, in order to implement the exercises used in the
MindfulnessBased Stress Reduction (MBSR) program by Kabat-Zinn (1979) of the activities
of the Musical Education area corresponding to Primary Education, while for data collection an
adaptation of the questionnaire “Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire” (FFMQ) by Baer et al.
(2006), as well as the JASP 0.13.1 application, SPSS and an excel spreadsheet for processing.
Regarding the results and the main objectives, the attempt was made to channel the level of
stress and anxiety among the participants, in terms of behavioral problems, achieving a partial
reduction. In this way, and based on inferential statistics, the presence of a strong positive linear
correlation between age, conceived as a quantitative ratio variable, and online sessions, as the
independent variable is deduced, resulting in 0.979. As a recommendation for future work, a larger
sample must be taken in order to establish more general results, reinforce the guidelines dictated to
teachers both to carry out Mindfulness and Music Education activities online and establish criteria
for inclusion and exclusion.

Keywords: Mindfulness, Music Education, COVID-19 and Online Music, digital divide, stress
and anxiety.