Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills: validering av den svenska översättningen och en studie av anhöriga till borderlinepatienter.

This paper has two parts. In the first part we analyse the Swedish translation of KIMS and we compare it with the American version that Baer and colleagues developed(Baer et al, 2004). Our focus is the factor structure, internal consistency, scale correlations and validity in relation to the already validated translation of the MAAS. The second part has three issues: Does a group of relatives to persons with borderline personality disorder differ from a group of university employees with respect to different aspects of mindfulness? What are the correlations between KIMS and the symptom measure BSI-GSI for the group of relatives? Has the Family Connections program had any effect on the degree of mindfulness for the group of relatives? 123 university employees answered the KIMS questionnaire. It is this material that we analyse in part one of this paper, and also in part two where we compare it with the data from the relatives. The factor analysis shows that the Swedish version of KIMS has a four-factor structure corresponding to the four mindfulness skills for which the items were written. It also corresponds closely to the factor structure in Baer et al.(2004). The result of the factor analysis should be interpreted with caution because of the low sample size. The results in this study for internal consistency and validity correspond closely to the results that Baer and colleagues presented. The group of relatives in part two of this paper consisted of 43 individuals. The mean scores were significantly lower for the group of relatives compared with the group of university employees for the KIMS full scale and for the subscales Acting with Awareness and Accepting without Judgement, but not for Observing or Describing. Correlations between the BSI and both Acting with Awareness and Accepting without Judgement was strong and negative. KIMS subscale Observing had a nearly significant positive correlation with BSI, while Describing was unrelated to the BSI. The comparison between pre- and postmeasurement indicates that Family Connection has a small but significant effect on Acting with awareness and Accepting without judgement, although these results should be seen as preliminary as there was no control group