Stress and life satisfaction among university students-a pilot study

Abstract

BackgroundLife satisfaction has been described as an overall cogni-tive assessment of one’s quality of life. This assessmentis based on how people believe their life should be inrelation to how it is. Anxiety has a negative impact onwell-being and life satisfaction seems to be highlyrelated with life satisfaction among University students.Studies have supported that lower levels of life satisfac-tion have been related to high anxiety.Materials and methodsThe study involved 200 University students, sampletaken from the National and Kapodistrian University ofAthens and the Xarokopion University (100 1st year and100 4th year). Subjects were asked to complete theSTAI-State & Trait Inventory and Life SatisfactionIndex. The questionnaires were given to students tocomplete during their Fall and Spring semester studies.ResultsThe mean ± standard deviation of the“life satisfactionscore” was 4.3 ± 0.5. Moreover, the majority of partici-pants (63.4%) were found to have low“life satisfaction”without any differences between the two sexes. Analysisof STAI showed that students low scores in STATEanxiety scale have high scores in life satisfaction scalewhereas high scores have low scores in life satisfaction(p = 0.005). Furthermore Trait Anxiety score analysisrevealed non significant results. Treating the life satis-faction score as a continuous variable, it was found thatthe mean score (4.2 ± 0.4) of students of the 1st yearwas statistically significantly lower compared to studentsofthe4thyear(4.4±0.6,p=0.005).Two-wayANOVAshowed that the two-way interaction between the yearand students’ sex (p < 0.001), state of anxiety (p =0.034), were statistically significant.ConclusionsAccording to the results of this study it can be sug-gested that students who have low anxiety scores havemore life satisfaction. The fact that significant differ-ences were found for the State condition and not theTrait could be explained by the perception and evalua-tion of the individual. Determining the relationshipbetween anxiety and life satisfaction inthe universitystudents could assist psychological counseling andguidance.