Effects of Online Versus In-Person Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR): The Impact of Adding Brief Individual Interviews

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the transition of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) from in-person to online delivery. However, the impact of this transition on participants’ characteristics, adherence, and outcomes in community-based MBSR programs has not been adequately examined. The present study retrospectively compared the effects on psychological well-being outcome measures of in-person delivery and online delivery without and with added individual interviews. A total of 506 Japanese participants completed validated questionnaires before and after participating in an 8-week community-based MBSR program delivered either in person (IP; n = 156) or online. Online participants attended the program either without brief individual interviews (OL-NoInt; n = 147) or in later cohorts with such interviews added to the protocol (OL-Int; n = 203). The questionnaires assessed three outcomes related to psychological well-being (PWB)—mood states, health-related quality of life, and perceived stress—and two presumed mediators of MBSR’s effects on PWB: mindfulness and self-compassion. Significant pre–post improvements were observed across all outcome measures in all three groups. Compared with IP, OL-NoInt demonstrated 32.3–62.0% smaller effect sizes in PWB outcomes despite comparable improvements in mediator variables. In contrast, OL-Int showed 27.0–184.2% larger effect sizes than OL-NoInt in both the mediators and the PWB outcomes, and was shown to be non-inferior to IP across all measures. Online MBSR may be as effective as in-person delivery when the program is augmented with brief individual interviews. Findings underscore the crucial role of instructor factors in facilitating effective MBSR online delivery. This study is not preregistered.