ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Public Mental Health
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1700358
This article is part of the Research TopicDigital mindfulness in primary care: Enhancing health through technologyView all 7 articles
How Digital Mindfulness Training Promotes Meaning in Life Among Social Workers: A Parallel Mediation Analysis and Latent Profile Analysis
Provisionally accepted
- Huainan Normal University, Huainan, China
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This study investigates the mechanism by which digital mindfulness training promotes meaning in life among social workers and explores individual heterogeneity in this process. Our findings offer strong empirical support for all five proposed hypotheses. Our analysis revealed that social workers who took part in digital mindfulness programs tended to report a stronger meaning in life in life. Using a parallel mediation model, we found two distinct pathways: digital mindfulness training was associated with reduced perceived social exclusion and, separately, with fewer psychotic-like experiences(Chiou et al. 2021). Both of these factors, in turn, independently contributed to a greater meaning in life. Using Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), we identified five distinct subgroups: the Flourishing Professional, the Socially Isolated yet Resilient, the Typical Practitioner, the Internally Struggling but Connected, and the High-Risk and Distressed. These groups were far from equivalent in terms of meaning in life; in fact, the High‑Risk/Distressed category scored at the lowest end of the scale. Viewed together, these patterns form a coherent explanatory structure that helps clarify how mindfulness interventions may operate. They also point to the importance of tailoring program content and delivery so that each subgroup's particular vulnerabilities and strengths are addressed, rather than relying on a single generic format.
Keywords: Digital Mindfulness Training, meaning in life, Social Workers, Perceived social exclusion, latent profile analysis
Received: 06 Sep 2025; Accepted: 16 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Chang, Cao and Tan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Fuqiang Tan, fuqiang-tan@hnnu.edu.cn
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