Anxiety and coping among Arab students in Israel during the 2020 Coronavirus lockdown

Abstract EN

Many countries adopted a lockdown policy to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

A lockdown constitutes a unique, unpreceded, complex, and ongoing situation of stress.

Groups distinguished by ethnicity, age, gender and occupation may experience a lockdown in different ways and at different levels.

The current study focused on Arab students studying at Israeli colleges and universities.

We administered the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and a questionnaire we developed to examine Ways of Coping During the Corona Lockdown (CDCL) to 202 male and female Arab students during the coronavirus lockdown in March and April 2020.

Contrary to our expectations, our results showed that the students’ anxiety decreased during the lockdown.

Students used a combination of coping methods.

Individual differences emerged in the students’ level of state as well as trait anxiety and in the coping ways they used.

Our results show that denial avoidance, wishful thinking and goal-oriented coping together with less use of thinking it over are associated with decreasing anxiety, while coping methods involving nondenial avoidance and thinking it over are associated with increasing anxiety.

We discuss the theoretical and practical contributions of our study.

More studies are needed to examine other ethnic, age, gender and occupational groups and use additional qualitative research paradigms.