Article ID: 201210133
This study was designed to clarify the anxieties of parents with children hospitalized in intensive care units. The written, open-ended responses of 197 parents regarding their most severe anxieties were analyzed by text mining. Results identified 87 terms used at least four times in the parents’ texts. The most frequently used terms included “after surgery,” followed by “doctor,” “surgery,” and “sudden turn for the worse.” We classified these words into 13 categories by cluster analysis. We extracted 17 topics concerning parents’ anxiety based on these categories: “anticipating worsening conditions,” “future anxiety,” “doctors’ explanations,” “nurses’ behaviors,” and “uncertainty about the illness,” among others. The appearance frequency of these topics differed based on the severity of the children’s medical conditions assessed by their parents and the type of hospital admission.
