Changes in College Students' Anxiety Level in 1993-2009:A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis

In the present study,a cross-temporal meta-analysis was applied to examine the changes in Chinese college students' anxiety level from 1993 to 2009.We collected the literature investigating college students by Spielberger's State-Trait Anxiety Inventory(STAI) in the past 17 years,and obtained 63 previous studies on state anxiety(N=29543) and 66 studies on trait anxiety(N=29694) for the present meta-analysis.The results showed that:(1) Correlations between state or trait anxiety mean scores and the year of data collection were positive and in a moderate level(0.40,0.27),suggesting that both the state and the trait anxiety levels of Chinese college students have been slowly increasing from 1993 to 2009.(2) The growth speed of college students' state anxiety was faster than that of trait anxiety,and the variation of state anxiety explained by the year was higher than that of trait anxiety.(3) The state and trait anxiety levels of both male and female college students had a significantly increasing trend between 1993 and 2009,and the college students' state and trait anxiety levels had not significant gender differences.