ORIGINAL ARTICLE   

Minerva Psychiatry 2023 September;64(3):374-81

DOI: 10.23736/S2724-6612.22.02297-7

Copyright © 2022 EDIZIONI MINERVA MEDICA

lingua: Inglese

A study to analyze anxiety disorder of a group of engineering students during the second wave of COVID-19

Sirshendu HORE ¹ ✉, Ayan KHASKEL ², Tanmay BHATTACHARYA ³

¹ Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hooghly Engineering and Technology College, Hooghly, India; ² Hooghly Engineering and Technology College, Hooghly, India; ³ Department of Information Technology, Techno Main Salt Lake, Kolkata, India

BACKGROUND: The second wave of COVID-19 has profoundly affected every sector of Indian, especially the student community. Hence, this study started with two objectives. The first is to analyze the anxiety level, among the students of an engineering college in India, during this pandemic. The second objective is to find an accurate prediction model to apprehend the level of anxiety beforehand. It will enable us to cater to timely crisis-oriented psychological services and take precautionary actions to reduce the anxiety level of this community in future crisis periods.
METHODS: To assess the psychological state of the students, the General Anxiety Disorder Questionnaire (GAD-7) has been employed. An online survey has been conducted in the month of April-May 2021 where 756 students of the Hooghly Engineering and Technology College (HETC) of West Bengal, India, had participated. To build an accurate predictive model through comparative analysis, four well-known machine-learning algorithms have been employed.
RESULTS: The study shows that 11.24% of participants have severe anxiety levels, 13.49% of participants have moderate, 24.73% have mild and 50.52 participants have no anxiety at all. It also shows the students of 4^th years have higher scores of anxiety (OR=1.22, 95%, CI =0.89-1.65) and 1^st-year students having lower scores in all measures compared to their senior, while the Female students having more psychological impact, compared to Male students. The proposed predictive model has achieved 99% accuracy.
CONCLUSIONS: The study shows the presence of a higher degree of anxiety among students compared to previous studies conducted by other researchers during the first wave as mentioned in the survey.

KEY WORDS: Anxiety; Students; Quarantine; Pandemics; COVID-19; Psychological stress