State-Trait Anxiety Inventory
The STAI inventory scores, categorized by the child’s age groups, are presented in the Table 3. Specifically, 55.6% reported mild state anxiety, 38.6% reported moderate state anxiety, and 5.6% reported severe state anxiety. In addition, 38.6% reported mild trait anxiety, 57.9% reported moderate trait anxiety, and 3.4% reported severe trait anxiety. Mean STAI-S and STAI-T scores in fathers (36.40±11.54 and 40.07±8.43, respectively) were numerically lower than in mothers (38.66±13.77 and 43.15±10.31, respectively), but the difference was not statistically significant (p=0.545, p=0.281, respectively). In numerical terms, trait anxiety consistently exceeded state anxiety, but statistically significant differences were observed in certain subgroups, such as among mothers who were primary caregivers (p=0.001) (Figure 2).
When the relationships between anxiety scores and baseline demographic and clinical characteristics of the patients were investigated using bivariate tables, there was higher STAI-S score for the parents who needed to use AAI (p<0.001) and higher STAI-T score of the parents whose child was hospitalized due to TNA (p=0.031) (Table 3). There was a strong positive correlation between STAI-S and STAI-T scores (r=0.584; p<0.001).