Influence of Age and Gender on Mindfulness Attention Awareness and Perceived Stress

The purpose of the current study was to investigate how age and gender interact with Mindfulness attention awareness and Perceives Stress. For this purpose, a sample of 351 participants was contacted for the study, including 113 males and 238 females. Age groups 18-25 and 26-35 were contacted using Google forms and age groups 36-50 were contacted offline from Delhi and Chandigarh through simple random sampling. In the sample, 67.8% were females and 32.2% were males. The Perceived Stress scale developed by (Cohen & Williamson, 1988) and Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale developed by (Brown & Ryan, 2003) were used to collect data from the participants. To study the difference across different age groups and gender, an Independent sample t-test, and Tukey's HSD test were used for data analysis. The results of the study conclude that a significant gender difference exists in the level of stress perceived, where females were found to have reported higher levels of perceived stress as compared to males. It is also seen that perceived stress has a significant difference in the age group 18-25 and 26-35 when compared with 36-50 years. On the mindfulness attention awareness, neither different age groups nor gender showed any significant difference. Further, the correlation between mindfulness attention awareness and the level of perceived stress revealed a negative relationship which suggests that as the level of mindfulness increases, perceived stress will decrease .