The Relationship between Test Anxiety and Spiritual Health in Nursing Students

Paying attention to positive dimensions of one’s life, for example spiritual health, is one of the ways which prevents worsening of test anxiety leading to a decrease in one’s power of challenge in test situations. The aim of this research was to investigate the relationship between test anxiety and spiritual health in female nursing students of Islamic Azad University of Najafabad. In this descriptive- correlational study, 110 female nursing students studying at 4th and 5th semesters in Islamic Azad University of Najafabad branch were selected with simple random sampling. Alison and Palutzian’s spiritual health questionnaire and Sarason’s test anxiety questionnaire were used to collect data. Data were then analyzed using descriptive statistics and Spearman and Mann Whitney tests. The findings of this research showed that there was a reverse between spiritual health and test anxiety (p=0.001, r= 0.360) but there was no statistical relationship between spiritual health, test anxiety and demographical aspects (p>0.05). Since nursing students believe that due to large volume of lessons, nursing exams are very stressful and cause anxiety and as researches have showed that anxiety has negative effects on students’ learning and considering the fact that spiritual health has positive effects on reducing anxiety, therefore, it seems that we have to pay particular attention to spiritual health and organize some special educations for nursing students in this direction.