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Abstract
The purpose of this study is to postulate a new scale to assess astanga yoga wellness benefits in adolescents.This scale is derived from the ancient Indian classical yoga text, Patanjal Yoga Sutra. The proposed scale is a eight level instrument consisting of yama (self-restraints), niyama (Self-observances), asana (postures), pranayama (breathing), pratyahara (sense control), dharana (concentration), dhyana (deeper concentration), samadhi (transcendental meditation) with 39 qualitative parameters. To test and validate this scale a study has been conducted with a sample size of 510 secondary and senior secondary students, from the KendriyaVidyalaya of Bhopal region, Madhya Pradesh, India. The Cronbach’s alpha was found to be 0.67. The sample adequacy, the KMO and Bartley’s significance test values were 0.77 at p<0.0001. The EFA and CFA analysis was carried out by using SPSS – AMOS version 25. The study fitness indices (absolute, incremental and parsimonious) matched well with the accepted levels of overall fitness. The regression coefficient was observed at 0.67 with total variance of 0.72. These results indicated that the proposed scale is a better predictor of “wellness benefits of astanga yoga” in terms of both reliability and validation. The new astanga yoga scale(AYS) was also tested and cross-validated well with the existing scales with the same sample population. In addition, proposed scale’s test-retest reliability and concurrent validity was observed within the acceptable ranges. With this new astanga yoga scale, we exhibit that astanga yoga theory of Patanjal Yoga Sutra could well be transliterated into modern psychometric assessment tool for adolescents wellness measurements.