State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children, STAIC (Spielberger, 1973)

This questionnaire is derived from the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) test. The Spanish version is applied, adapted for the first time by Spielberger et al. (1982) and currently revised on a psychometric level by Guillén-Riquelme and Buela-Casal (2011). Thus, there is a solid evidence in relation to the measured constructs, because of its long history of use in different fields (Barnes et al., 2002; Rossi and Pourtois, 2012; Guillén-Riquelme and Buela-Casal, 2014) and updated to the general Spanish population (Spielberger et al., 2015). It evaluates anxiety as a state and as a trait, constituting two independent scales made up of 20 items each with 3 response options (1 = not at all, 2 = somewhat, 3 = very much). The first scale refers to how the child feels at a given time, and the second relates to how he/she feels in general. The state anxiety scale tries to clarify “how the child feels at a given moment,” and measure transitory states of anxiety, that is, feelings of apprehension and tension and concern which fluctuate in intensity over time. Examples of items used in this scale are “your child feels calm” or “your child feels restless.” The trait anxiety scale measures “how the child feels in general,” exploring relatively stable differences in propensity to anxiety, that is, differences between children in their tendency to show anxious states. Some items on this scale are “your child is concerned about making mistakes” or “your child feels like crying.” Although the original implementation of the instrument is self-applicable with help of tutors or guardians if necessary, due to the special circumstances of the confinement and the telematic sending of the test, it was chosen that the guardians would be the ones to complete the questionnaire, in collaboration with the child when necessary. For this, the formulation of each item was adapted as previously exemplified. However, in order to guarantee the reliability of this instrument, Cronbach’s alpha was calculated for each subscale. Thus, for State Anxiety, the internal coefficient is 0.91 and 0.89 for Trait Anxiety.