Correlations between stress and anxiety levels in nursing students

Abstract

Objective: Transversal, descriptive, and correlational study with 71 professionalizing Nursing students, with the purpose of describing social-demographic data, to verify and to correlate stress and anxiety levels.

Methods: Data collection was performed on January 2011, from Vasconcelo’s List of Stress Symptoms and Spielberger’s Inventory of Trait and State Anxiety.

Results: There were 90.44% female students with an average 28.87 years of age; 32.39% obtained average stress score and 64.79% high score; 43.66% for high score in Trait and State Anxiety; 43.66% and 36.62% for moderate score respectively for Trait and State Anxiety. At Pearson correlation the following coefficients were obtained: LSS/Trait-Anxiety (r=0.656/p=0.000); LSS/State-Anxiety (r=0.512/p=0.000).

Conclusion: Students presented high levels of stress and anxiety and correlations between these variables were positive. Future studies are necessary with higher samples.