Assessing how practical a self-compassion-based body image intervention is for people with endometriosis

The intervention is called My Changed Body and is designed to increase participant levels of self-compassion towards themselves and their body by participants completing a series of self-compassionate writing tasks online, via a Qualtrics survey. The experimental arm involves participants being provided with an overview of what self-compassion means in the form of a written paragraph in the online survey (approximately less than a minute's reading time), before responding to 6 self-compassionate writing prompts about their body. For example, "Keeping in mind how your body has changed as a result of having endometriosis, please write a paragraph showing understanding, kindness, and concern for yourself in a way you would help a friend who had undergone the experience." The intervention is self-guided and conducted wholly online, on an individual basis. The intervention is delivered at baseline, a 1-week follow-up, a 1-month follow-up, and a 3-month follow-up. The baseline involves demographic items, baseline measures of psychological constructs (body image, self-compassion, depression and anxiety), and the initial 6 writing tasks, which are to be completed in the one sitting immediately after responding to the demographic items. The amount of writing given in response to each writing task is at the discretion of the participant for two of the writing tasks (though the writing prompts suggest providing a detailed response), whilst three of the writing tasks ask participants to write a paragraph, and one writing task asks participants to write a letter (of unspecified length). The written responses were not assessed. The baseline is estimated to take approximately 25 minutes all up. Each of the follow-ups involve the same measures of psychological constructs and a "top-up" of one of the self-compassionate writing prompts, i.e., participants were asked to respond to the last writing prompt from the baseline again ("Write a self-compassionate letter to yourself, perhaps extending this to a letter to all people with endometriosis. Having endometriosis, what are some of the things you've needed to hear about your body? What are you needing to say to yourself? What would you say to your friends and family, or more broadly, all people, struggling with these issues?"). Each follow-up is estimated to take 10 minutes.