Introduction
Young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 need at least seven hours of sleep each night to maintain their cognitive, emotional, and physical functions, but college students tend to lack quality sleep. A sample of 1,160 college students reported sleeping on average 5.85 ± 1.85 hours per night, and 35% of them considered their sleep bad or very bad (Elagra et al., 2016). Lack of sleep has been associated with higher risk of negative moods, unintentional injuries, risk-taking behaviors, and poor academic performance (National Adolescent and Young Adult Health Information Center, 2014). Although various negative effects of poor sleep quality have been reported in the current literature, several outcomes of poor sleep quality and short sleep duration remain unexplored.
Various factors can affect the quality of sleep in college students, including sleeping habits and individual factors. For example, students who are long, frequent nappers were found to be more likely to experience poor sleep quality during the night and sleep deprivation than other students (Ye, Hutton Johnson, Keane, Manasia, & Gregas, 2015). According to Thomas (2014), approximately 24% of college students have a diagnosable sleep disorder, which affects the duration and quality of their sleep. Students with diagnosable sleep disorders were more likely to complain about their physical and mental health. Even though students with sleep disorders proved to have similar academic performance when compared, Thomas (2014) points out that “students with chronic sleep complaints/disorders may have learned to compensate” (p. 35). Furthermore, it was found that 88% of the sample complained about sleep-related issues, so it is possible that both groups had academic problems caused by poor sleep quality.
Ellis, Walczyk, Buboltz, and Felix (2014) found that the compensatory effect may explain why sleep-deprived adults can perform some tasks of short duration. Specifically, they found that verbal efficiency in reading tasks increases because of sleep loss, and is considered that sleep deprivation does not have a significant effect on automatic cognitive processes. However, sustaining controlled cognitive processes required for learning new materials and long-term focus is possible only for those individuals who get enough quality sleep.
According to Elagra et al. (2016), poor sleep quality is associated with lower grade point averages among dental students, and that is especially true for students in clinical years. Based on the sleep quality index results, Elagra et al. (2016) also divided the students into the clinical and non-clinical group. Students with poor sleep quality that warrants clinical attention were more likely to experience poor academic performance compared to the non-clinical group. A possible explanation of poor academic performance among sleep-deprived college students is daytime sleepiness, which increases as the duration of sleep decreases (Khan, Khan, Zafar, & Syed, 2014). Daytime sleepiness and problem behaviors were observed in college students who sleep less than 6.75 hours per day, so that can be considered the lower boundary of sleep college students need to maintain cognitive functions required for their education (Khan et al., 2014).
Although the effects of sleep deprivation on college students has been investigated in the recent literature, previous studies did not address the behavioral problems associated with lack of sleep in college students. The relationship between sleep deprivation and poor academic performance can be explained by many possible variables, such as daytime sleepiness, poor memory consolidation, or tardiness in performing academic obligations. The purpose of the proposed study will be to investigate the relationship between sleep quality and tardiness in college students. Understanding how sleep quality is associated with tardiness is important because all possible causes and interventions need to be considered when changing undesirable behaviors.
Research Questions
RQ1: Are students with good quality sleep significantly less likely to be tardy compared to students with poor quality sleep?
RQ2: What is the pattern of the relationship between overall sleep quality and tardiness?
RQ3: What is the pattern of the relationship between sleep duration and tardiness?
Methods
Type of Study
A non-experimental quantitative design will be used as the most feasible research design for investigating the association between lack of sleep and tardiness in college students. A true experiment would require the researcher to manipulate the independent variable, and it would be unethical to knowingly manipulate sleep deprivation and risk the participants’ health and academic accomplishments. The proposed study also aims to determine the nature of the association between sleep quality and tardiness, as well as differences in tardiness between two groups of students, so a true experiment is not required as long as causal inferences regarding the relationship between the measured variables are not made.
Participants
The participants in the proposed study will be full-time college students between 18 and 25 years of age. College students were selected as the targeted population because poor sleep quality could depend on lifestyle factors and some demographic factors, such as age or occupation. Therefore, investigating sleep quality within a single population of people with similar demographics will ensure better generalizability of the results to that particular population. Furthermore, college students with sleep deprivation issues are often not aware of their condition, so it is important to continue investigating problems associated sleep quality among college students.
A power analysis was conducted to determine the sample size required to conduct an independent samples t-test. The following parameters were used to perform the power calculation: (a) Cohen’s d of 0.5, (b) significance level of 0.05, (c) power of 0.8, and (d) two-sample test type. The sample size required to achieve the desired power of 0.8 turned out to be 64 students.
Measures and Instruments
Sleep quality will be measured with the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), which consists of nine items measuring seven components of quality sleep. An example item is, “During the past month, how often have you had trouble sleeping because you cannot get to sleep within 30 minutes” (Buysse, Reynolds, Monk, Berman, & Kupfer, 1989, p. 209). The data analysis will use the global PSQI score, which indicates overall sleep quality, and sleep duration, which the students will report in item 4A of the PSQI. The global sleep quality score of 5 is the cut-off point, and an equal or higher score indicates clinically significant poor sleep with 89.6% sensitivity and 86.5% specificity (Buysse et al., 1989).
Tardiness will be measured with a self-reported survey. The participants will answer the questions with a 5-points scale, which will allow for the following answers: never, rarely (1-5 times per year), sometimes (5-10 times per semester), often (approximately once per week), and very often (more than once per week). The survey will contain three questions:
How often are you late for your first class in the morning?
How often are you late for classes throughout the day?
Do you submit your assignments within given deadlines?
The survey will also contain questions about the demographic characteristics of the participants without collecting personally identifiable information. The only demographic variables collected for this study will be sex, race/ethnicity, and age. Age will be collected as a numerical discrete variable, whereas sex and race/ethnicity will be collected as categorical variables.
Procedures
The participants will be recruited via the admissions office of Lassen College. The lottery method will be used to select the participants that will be invited to join the study to ensure that the sample is random. The required number of participants is 64, but it is expected that the response rate will be approximately 60%, so a total of 110 students will be invited to participate in the study. Although sampling college students from a single institution will reduce the generalizability of the results, a room at Lassen College will be reserved for administering the survey in person. Therefore, participating in the proposed study is restricted to the setting of the study, which will be difficult to access for remote students.
Expected Results
The data will be analyzed using Student’s t-test for independent samples to compare the self-reported measure of tardiness between the group of students who reported getting enough sleep and those who reported not getting enough sleep. It is expected that the difference between the mean tardiness score will be significant because the students with a score greater than or equal to five on the PSQI will prove to be tardier than students with a PSQI score of less than five.
It is expected that the correlation analysis will show a negative relationship between the amount of sleep and tardiness. In other words, as the number of hours of sleep increases, it is expected that the self-assessment of tardiness will decrease. It is also expected that the correlation analysis will show a significant negative relationship between overall sleep quality, which will be measured by the global PSQI score, and tardiness. Therefore, tardiness is expected to decrease as overall sleep quality increases.
Limitations and Future Directions
Three limitations of the proposed study have to be noted. First, it will not be possible to make causal inferences based on the results because the data will be cross-sectional and because the research design is non-experimental. Second, various confounding variables can affect the relationship between sleep quality and tardiness. For example, personality traits can determine whether or not a person is impulsive or disciplined, which will determine the behaviors of that person, including sleeping habits and tardiness. The third limitation of the proposed study is the lack of validated scales for measuring tardiness, so a self-reported survey constructed for the proposed study will be used to collect data. It is expected that students will answer the questions honestly and objectively considering the anonymous nature of their participation.
Further research will be required to investigate how lack of sleep and tardiness is moderated by other variables, such as study programs, geographic location, demographic variables, and other psychological constructs (e.g., personality traits). A larger sample size from different locations will be necessary to produce generalizable results if those variables are investigated. Future work also needs to develop and evaluate possible interventions implemented by academic support staff that would decrease tardiness among college students. One possibility is to investigate the effects of raising awareness about the importance of sleep on sleep quality and tardiness. Finally, it is important to consider that sleep quality is associated with various physical and psychological problems, so future research needs to explore how poor sleep quality affect the overall quality of life in college students.
References
Buysse, D. J., Reynolds, C. F., Monk, T. H., Berman, S. R., & Kupfer, D. J. (1989). The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index: a new instrument for psychiatric practice and research. Psychiatry Research, 28(2), 193-213.
Elagra, M. I., Rayyan, M. R., Alnemer, O. A., Alshehri, M. S., Alsaffar, N. S., Al-Habib, R. S., & Almosajen, Z. A. (2016). Sleep quality among dental students and its association with academic performance. Journal of International Society of Preventive & Community Dentistry, 6(4), 296-301. doi:10.4103/2231-0762.186788
Ellis, S. K., Walczyk, J. J., Buboltz, W., & Felix, V. (2014). The relationship between self-reported sleep quality and reading comprehension skills. Sleep Science, 7(4), 189-196. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.slsci.2014.12.001
Khan, M., Khan, U. A., Zafar, H., & Syed, A. (2014). Association between duration of sleep and Epworth score in male medical students. Rawal Medical Journal, 39(4), 369-371.
National Adolescent and Young Adult Health Information Center. (2014). Retrieved September 2, 2016 from http://nahic.ucsf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Sleep-Brief-FINAL.pdf
Thomas, S. J. (2014). A survey of sleep disorders in college students: A study of prevalence and outcomes (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
Ye, L., Hutton Johnson, S., Keane, K., Manasia, M., & Gregas, M. (2015). Napping in college students and its relationship with nighttime sleep. Journal of American College Health, 63(2), 88-97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2014.983926
