Undergraduate Students’ Anxiety during the Coronavirus Disease Epidemic in 2019

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the anxiety elements of students and create the anxiety prediction equations of students during the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The samples were 662 students in their second semester of academic year 2019 from the Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, Silpakorn University.  The research tool was a questionnaire with a reliability coefficient of 0.829.  Using email for data collection, the data were analyzed by frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation (S.D.), exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and a dummy variable for multiple regression analysis, with Enter and Stepwise methods.

            The results showed that (1) students have high level of anxiety in every dimension, with the highest one being the economic condition that they or their family may encounter. Next is the anxiety about learning, i.e. carrying out their Bachelor’s thesis and graduating within the academic calendar; (2) students’ anxieties from the COVID-19 pandemic can be divided into 2 groups: learning anxiety and financial anxiety.  Both elements can describe the total variance of 54.886%; and (3) the equations used to predict learning anxiety (LEN) and financial anxiety (FIA) are as follows:

LEN  =  3.104 + 0.964THD* + 0.361SCD* + 0.198SOC* + 0.179FRT*

FIA  = 3.628 + 0.572THD* + 0.596FRT* + 0.456SCD* – 0.173PRT*

            The above equations can describe the variance of 24.0% (R² = 0.240) and 9.2% (R² = 0.092) for learning anxiety and financial anxiety respectively.