The Chinese version of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (C-STAI) was administered to 2,150 Chinese secondary school students, along with other measures of psychological well-being. The results showed that the correlation between A-State and A-Trait scores was significant, and both scales correlated significantly with all other measures of psychological well-being.
Analyses of the strengths of association among the measures revealed that while A-Trait and A-State scores were differentially sensitive to indices of chronic mental health attributes and acute symptoms, both scales were found to be more predictive of measures of anxiety. These findings generally provided support for the concurrent validity of the C-STAI, and the significant correlation between A-State and A-Trait is consistent with data reported in the literature.
The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (Form X) originally was developed in an attempt to measure both state and trait anxiety. While trait or chronic anxiety was conceptualized as a relatively stable and permanent characteristic of people, state or acute anxiety was regarded as a transient condition that varied from day to day or moment to moment (Spielberger, Gorsuch, & Lushene, 1970). The STAI has been employed widely to assess anxiety in epidemiological studies (e.g., Knight, Waal-Manning, & Godfrey, 1983;Knight, Waal-Manning, & Spears, 1983) and in research in which the relationship between anxiety and other psychological constructs was investigated (e.g., Duckro, Margolis,