State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-S)

The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) is a self-report questionnaire created to measure a person's level of anxiety. The original inventory (Form X) was revised in 1979 to replace items that had weak psychometric properties for certain groups, to better discriminate between feelings of anxiety and depression, and to improve its factor structure (Spielberger et al., 1983). The updated inventory (Form Y; Spielberger et al., 1980) was used in the present study. The STAI consists of two forms. The Trait form (STAI-T) measures individual differences in anxiety proneness and a person's general anxiety levels, while the State form (STAI-S) measures the intensity of the participant's anxiety at the moment of testing, in the recent past, or how they anticipate they would feel in a hypothetical situation (Spielberger et al., 1983). We asked students to answer the questions based on their present state. Each form consists of 20 statements. On the STAI-S, participants rate the intensity of their feelings on a Likert scale from (1) not at all to (4) very much so. Spielberger et al., collected normative adult data for these forms from 4 different groups: working adults (N = 1,838), college students (N = 855), high school students (N = 424), and military recruits (1964). The STAI-S showed good reliability and validity across the different normative groups; Cronbach's alpha = 0.86–0.95, and median item-remainder correlation = 0.55–0.63 (Spielberger et al., 1983). Construct validity was tested in two studies by comparing the mean STAI-S scores of college students in anxiety-inducing conditions (e.g., how they would feel just before an important exam, after being interrupted on the third administration of the Concept Mastery Test (Terman, 1956), or after watching a stressful movie) to mean STAI-S scores in control or relaxed conditions (e.g., normal form procedures, after a relaxation training period). In both studies, the anxiety-inducing conditions resulted in higher scores (Spielberger et al., 1983). The adequate reliability and validity of this instrument across different populations was also confirmed in a paper summarizing reported psychometric properties reported in 75 studies using the STAI (Barnes et al., 2002). In the present study, the STAI-S scores were used to examine students' anxiety levels, and as the dependent variable in exploratory regression analyses.