A study of the effect of Vipassana meditation on Psychological Well Being of employees and impact of demographic factors on meditation outcome

Vipassana meditation is an ancient technique whose numerous benefits are described in the literature. In this twofold empirical study the impact of this technique, when used as an intervention on the Psychological Well Being (PWB) of employees is measured and analyzed. Secondly, an attempt has been made to determine whether demographic factors influence meditation outcomes in meditators. It was hypothesized that the meditator group would score higher on the standardized PWB instrument as compared to the non-meditator control group. For this purpose an experimental group comprising of meditator employees and a control group comprising of non-meditator employees each having 260 respondents was used and the results were analyzed statistically. Also in this study total 15 parameters on employee behaviour, personality and mindfulness were measured using four instruments after implementing Vipassana Meditation as an intervention.The impact of demographic factors was studied on these 15 measures of meditation outcome by statistical analysis using SPSS 20.0 software. The results showed that 1) Scores of PWB for the experimental group were higher and the difference was statistically significant. This result was in agreement with the research objective and validated the use of VM as an intervention; and 2) demographics have no effect on meditation outcomes. This indicates that meditation helps to develop intrinsic characteristics and brings about an inner transformation.