A causal-comparative research design was used in this study. The statistical population consisted of all students of the Farhangian University of Mashhad in 2020. Using the Morgan table, 752 students (323 men and 429 women) were randomly selected, out of whom 329 people were active students who had engaged in regular physical activity for one hour on three days per week during the past year. The selected active students all met these conditions. The remaining 423 subjects were inactive students. The subjects were compared in terms of general health, social health, and COVID-19-induced anxiety using the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28), Keyes Social Health Questionnaire, and Corona Disease Anxiety Scale (CDAS). Informed consent was obtained from all subjects participating in the present study. This study received the approval of the research ethics committee of Mashhad University of Medical Sciences with a code of IR.MUMS.REC.1399.445.
General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28): it is one of the most popular tools developed to assess non-psychotic psychiatric disorders in the general population. This screening tool has been designed to identify short-term changes in general health and focuses on two main concerns. The first one is the inability to carry out normal functions and the second one is the appearance of new phenomena that lead to anxiety. In the present study, the 28-item general health questionnaire was used, which has been designed by Goldberg (1979) [14]. The questions of this questionnaire examine an individual's mental state in the last month and cover four main areas of somatic symptoms, anxiety, insomnia, social dysfunction, and severe depression. The psychometric properties of the Persian version of this questionnaire were examined by Taghavi [15]. It was recognized that the questionnaire enjoyed good psychometric properties so that its test-retest reliability was equal to 0.70 and its internal consistency, obtained using Cronbach's alpha, was equal to 0.90.
Keyes Social Health Questionnaire: This questionnaire was used to collect data. It consists of 32 questions that assess five components of social health (social cohesion, social prosperity, social acceptance, social participation, and social adaptation). Social prosperity means believing that society is growing positively. This component includes seven questions. Social cohesion means feeling should be a part of society, belong to it, be supported by it, and have a share in it. This component also includes seven questions. Social acceptance means having a positive attitude towards people, acknowledging others, and generally accepting people despite some of their confusing and complex behaviors. This component includes six questions. Social participation means feeling that people have something valuable to offer to society and thinking that their daily activities are valued by society. This component also includes six questions. The last component, social adaptation, indicates to believe that society is understandable, logical, and predictable, to know and be interested in society and its concepts. This component includes six questions [16]. To investigate the reliability and validity of the Social Health Questionnaire, Sherbatian [17] conducted a study on the students of Mashhad University of Medical Sciences in 2012 and obtained Cronbach's alpha of 0.90 for the variable of social health.
Corona Disease Anxiety Scale (CDAS): This tool was developed by Alipour et al. [18) in 2019 to measure anxiety caused by the outbreak of the coronavirus in Iran. Based on Cronbach's alpha, good validity and reliability were reported for mental symptoms (α = 0.879), somatic symptoms (α = 0.861) and the whole questionnaire (α = 0.919). The final version of this tool includes 18 items. The items measure mental and somatic symptoms and are scored using a 4-point Likert scale (never = 0, sometimes = 1, very often = 2, and always = 3); Therefore, the highest and lowest scores that the respondents get in this questionnaire are 0 and 54. High scores indicate a higher level of anxiety in individuals. The reliability of this tool (obtained using Cronbach's alpha) has been equal to 0.919. It consists of questions related to the rate of searching for news about the coronavirus pandemic, the infection of close relatives to coronavirus, the death of close relatives due to coronavirus disease, the anxiety caused by coronavirus disease, and the communication conflicts in the family during the quarantine [18].
In the present study, the normal distribution of data was investigated by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and the data were analyzed statistically using independent t-test and Pearson correlation coefficient test. The software used was SPSS 21 and the significance level was determined to be 0.05.