A cross-sectional study on the prevalence of anxiety among school students in Teliamura municipality area of Tripura

BACKGROUND: Anxiety in adolescence has been a serious problem nowadays. It is seen that anxiety among students cause many harms to their mental and physical health affecting their career. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study is to know about the burden of anxiety among school students and to find out the association of different grades of anxiety with sociodemographic characteristics and any other factors. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In a cross-sectional study, 400 school students of Class IX–XII, from four schools of Teliamura Municipality area of Tripura were included during May 2016–June 2016. Required sample from each school was selected by proportion probability sampling. Then, students were selected using systematic random sampling technique until the sample size from each school was reached. Beck anxiety inventory was used to assess the different grades of anxiety among students. RESULTS: Most of the students were suffering from mild anxiety (49.4%) followed by moderate anxiety (43.3%) and severe anxiety (7.3%). The mean anxiety score of the school students was 16.90 ± 9.02. Female students (10.9%) had more severe anxiety compared to male students (3.8%) and this difference of different grades of anxiety with gender was statistically significant. The association of different grades of anxiety with a history of stressful events in the past 6 months was found to be statistically significant. CONCLUSION: Anxiety was present in each age group and females were suffering more with severe anxiety. Future research on academic anxiety should be done to combat against this problem of anxiety among school students.