Can a culturally-responsive Mobile health (mHealth) application reduce African Americans’ stress?: A pilot feasibility study

African Americans experience numerous stress-related health outcomes and encounter disproportionate barriers to utilizing health-related services that could reduce poor health. Culturally-responsive mindfulness mHealth approaches provide promising opportunities to increase access to health skills that can reduce stress and improve wellbeing among this population. We employed a within subjects pre-post design over a two-week intervention period to analyze if the use of a culturally-responsive mindfulness mHealth application (app) contributed to pre-post changes in a sample of 39 African Americans. Paired t-tests revealed that, following the intervention, participants used more mindfulness practices, had greater self-efficacy using mindfulness, had lower levels of emotion regulation difficulties, and reported lower levels of stress. Participants also expressed high levels of satisfaction with the app and gave it positive ratings for its usability. These findings support the feasibility of a culturally-responsive mindfulness mHealth app to reduce stress and improve emotion regulation skills among African Americans. Future research directions are proposed.