104 Chapter 6 in need of additional mental support or when a participant indicated this him- or herself. As planned several sessions were recorded. Procedure Between January and Augustus 2020 a total of 54 elementary school teachers were recruited for RCT participation in school year 2020-2021. They received an information leaflet, had a screening interview by telephone and provided written informed consent. Teachers were randomly assigned to either MBSR between September and November 2020 or the waiting list control condition. Teachers in the control group were offered to follow the program in March and April 2021. Both the intervention group and the control group for the 2020-2021 school year participated in the current qualitative study. Due to COVID-19 restrictions MBSR for the intervention group was offered in person for sessions 1 to 4, and online for sessions 5 to 8. MBSR for the control group was offered online. For reasons of triangulation, the qualitative data was collected in two different ways. The first was by means of focus group interviews. Focus groups are semi-structured discussions with small groups (n = 4 - 12) that aim to explore a specific set of issues. Participants individually answer the facilitators’ questions and are encouraged to talk and interact with each other. In this way the group interaction encourages respondents to explore and clarify individual and shared perspectives (Hutter et al., 2011). Focus group interviews were scheduled in March 2021, 16 weeks after the intervention group completed MBSR. The participants were contacted by telephone, asked whether they would like to participate in a focus group interview and provided written informed consent for recording the interview. An independent, experienced researcher and lecturer in higher education with expertise in education and knowledge of mindfulness (AML) conducted the three focus group interviews online for approximately 1 hour per group. The semistructured interview started with the open question: Can you tell us something about the impact of the mindfulness course on your functioning as a teacher. A topic list with main themes was used to guide the remainder of the interview: specific (teacher) skills, classroom climate quality and pupil teacher relationship (See Table 2). If necessary, questions about these themes were supplemented with clarifying or deepening questions. The second way we collected data was through video and audio recordings during the last session of MBSR which was offered to the control group. All participants were told at the start of the program that, with their permission, part of the last session would be recorded. During the penultimate session, as part of the regular program, it was announced that during the last session, participants would be asked to answer the question: “What has MBSR program brought you?” which was then supplemented for this study with the question: “ Can you tell something about the impact of the mindfulness course on your functioning as a teacher?” No topic list was used during these interviews. Each participant had a few minutes to answer both questions.
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