Examination On Health Anxieties Of Students In The Faculty Of Health Sciences About COVID-19

Abstract

Health anxiety is a state of fear that an individual has a major health problem or will experience a health problem as a result of misinterpreting their physical findings. In this cross-sectional descriptive study, no sampling method was used and all students (893), who studied in Bandırma Onyedi Eylül University Faculty of Health Sciences between March and April 2020, were tried to be reached. The sample included 504 students who voluntarily agreed to participate in the study. The sample’s power to represent the population was 56.43%. A questionnaire was used as the data collection tool. The questionnaire consisted of a personal information form and the Health Anxiety Inventory (Short Form). The data were analyzed using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) 16.0 package program. Descriptive statistics such as number, percentage, mean and standard deviation were used in the data analysis. Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal Wallis were used to evaluate the personal characteristic and mean scores on health anxiety since the data were not distributed normally. Considering the general profile of the students participating in the study, the mean age was 20.65±1.5, and most students were female (83.1%), first grade (41.3%) and nursing students (40.3%). The most common sources of information about the Covid-19 were the official announcements from the Ministry of Health (86.9%), social media (81.5%) and TV news (80.4%). The total mean scores of the students on the health anxiety inventory was 18.55±6.07 while their mean scores on the body dimension was 14.07±4.87 and on the additional dimension was 4.47±2.43. When the significance level of the correlation between the variables and health anxiety was evaluated, a significant difference was found only with the variable of sex, and there were no significant differences between the variables of the department and grade of the students. Accordingly, female students had higher anxiety levels than the male students. It is recommended that the study should be conducted with all students and similar studies should be carried out after the pandemic since there are differences between the period in which the study was conducted and in the following periods.

Keywords

• Health Anxiety
• University Students
• New Coronavirüs
• Pandemic

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