Investigation of state and trait anxiety levels among pharmacy students in T.R.N.C

Objective: Anxiety is a complex of feelings which includes fear, worry and tension that occurs when a person faces a threatening situation or perceives a condition as a threat. In terms of psychology, anxiety is a natural response against any kind of stressor, which is an essential emotional reaction to survive. In our modern world, primitive stressors likes fear of animal attacks or natural disasters leave their place to more complicated ones. Having a good job, being rich and successful in educational life and professional career, “shining” amongst class or workmates, getting appreciation or similar motives are important in people’s daily life and may even cause depression or joy. Because the world gets much more populated and science amazingly evolves every day; studying in the universities gets much harder, which turns students’ lives into nightmares. Particularly, it is known that students who study in faculties difficult to handle and get successful develop anxiety easily. Pharmacy is one of those, so we decided to investigate anxiety levels of pharmacy students categorizing each class, using two different questionnaires.

Methods: STAI -I and STAI - II are inventories developed by Charles Spielberger in late 60s to determine state and trait anxiety levels. Trait anxiety refers to general anxiety, while state anxiety refers to current anxiety. Because most of the students were planning to work in Turkey, some extra questions have been added to the questionnaire in the light of common problems and worries amongst pharmacists in Turkey. Thirty questions were asked to 324 students (M=192, F=132) in total. Independent samples t-test and One-Way ANOVA were applied to the original first 20 questions in each test which belong to STAI I-II and have four-graded answers; the investigators’ extra questions were evaluated as a nonparametric test and Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis H tests were used.

Results: The results showed that female students have higher trait anxiety scores, while males have higher state anxiety scores. It has also found that 4th grade students have higher state anxiety scores compared to the other grades. However, 5th grade (final year) students show higher trait anxiety scores.

Conclusion: We need more comprehensive studies comparing different faculties’ students anxiety scores using STAI I-II which may enhance our knowledge about the relation between an occupation’s success and educational stress in a particular country