Music as an Anxiety Reliever among Students

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Music has fascinated people for many centuries with its ability to evolve strong emotions and more people in profound ways.

METHODS

The study used a pre-test and post-test design. Subjects are randomly selected and assigned to three groups. Two groups will receive the treatment and labeled as experimental group and the third group will not receive the treatment and labeled as the control group. The independent variables of this study are music; rock and jazz music, the dependent variable is anxiety while the extraneous variables are noise, hunger, and the space of the counseling room. The participants were thirty-fourth-year students of Tala High School. They were randomly selected using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). Ten students listened to rock music and ten students listened to jazz music as the experimental group, while the last ten students belonged to the control group who sit in silence during the experiment. There were thirty participants in the experiment taken from public high school (Tala High School); informed consent was given to the school to be able to perform the experiment.

RESULTS

The effect of music (Rock and Jazz) on relieving anxiety was tested. Data were analyzed by SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). One-way analysis of variance(ANOVA) was used. The mean score between subjects is 20.84 and for within-subject is 77.47. It was found out that there is no significant effect of using music as an anxiety reliever. The computed value for F is 0.22 P=0.05 the tabular value for F is 3.35(Ft > Fc). When it comes to the reference of music, the students tend to relax when jazz music was played. This result equals to the control group, students tend to reduce their anxiety when silence was used.

DISCUSSIONS

The current study was designed to know if music can relieve anxiety among students. The results of the current study indicated that music has no significant effect on relieving anxiety. There were many extraneous variables present during the experiment, the counseling room is too small to accommodate by ten participants per treatment. Therefore, the noise was also present. Hunger was also a part of the extraneous variable. This study examines the effect of music on relieving anxiety among students in the hope for a better understanding of the effect of music on relieving anxiety.