40 Chapter 3 The third aim is to examine possible mediating factors of treatment outcome, such as mindfulness skills (i.e. observing, describing, acting with awareness, non-judgement and non-reactivity), self-compassion and emotion regulation skills. Based on research by Jennings, (2017), Roeser, (2016), Roeser et al., (2012), Skinner and Beers (2016) we hypothesize that an improvement of mindfulness skills, self-compassion and emotion regulation skills will lead to a reduction of perceived stress. In addition, we explore whether school weight, age, past and present psychological problems and teachers’ years of experience act as potential moderators of program effects. The final aim is to conduct qualitative interviews after the MBSR program to get a more in-depth view of teachers’ perception of the impact of MBSR on their teacher skills, classroom climate quality and pupil-teacher relationship. METHODS/DESIGN Study design The design of the study is a superiority RCT in which elementary school teachers are randomly allocated with a ratio of 1:1 to either the MBSR program or the waiting list control condition (see Fig. 1). Because of practical and financial constraints, the control condition consists of no intervention. As we would like to offer MBSR to all the teachers who express interest, we also wanted to be able to offer it to those allocated to the control condition. The study protocol has been ethically approved by the Internal Review Board (IRB) Ethics Committee Social Science, Faculty of social sciences Radboud University and is registered under number ECSW-2019-029. Figure 1. Flow diagram of the study design
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