An Exploratory Study on Children's Anxiety Related to Disease Characteristics

환아의 질병특성에 따른 불안에 대한 탐색적 연구

The purpose of this study is to explore the level of children's anxiety related to disease characteristics The subjects of this study were 72 childrens (6year-10 year) who were admitted to the pediatric wards at University Hospital and 24 healthy children, and 24 mothers of children with fatal & chronic illness. The data were collected with sarason's Anxiety scale for children & spielberger's State Trait Anxiety Inventory for mothers and analyzed of One way Anova, Duncun Test, Pearson correlation, and T-test. The results of this study were as follows : 1) There was significant difference in children's anxiety related to disease characteristics(P<0.01) Fatally ill children showed highest level of anxiety and chronically, acutely ill children in order. And there was no significant difference in anxiety between acutely ill children and healthy children. There was significant difference in anxiety between groups of ill and healthy children(P<0.01) .The anxiety of ill children was higher than that of healthy children. 2) There was no significant correlation between children's anxiety and their age. 3) There was no significant difference in children's anxiety related to frequency of hospital admission. 4) There was significant correlation between children's anxiety and duration of illness(P<0.01). The longer the duration of illness is, the higher children's anxiety is. 5) There was significant difference in mothers' anxiety between groups of fatally ill and chronically ill children(P<0.05). The anxiety of mothers of fatally ill children was higher than that of mothers of chronically ill children. 6) There was no significant correlation between children's anxiety of fatal and chronic illness and their mothers' anxiety.