Sleep, Stress, and the College Student

Created by Martin Shapiro, Faith Haile, and Sabrina Brooks

Overview

• A quality night’s sleep is vital for physical and mental health.

• Sleep plays a large role in good cognitive functions such as learning, memory, and attention.

• A good night’s sleep helps reduce stress and anxiety.

• For all of these reasons, quality sleep is vital for success in college.

• This is a survey experiment looking at the relationship between sleep quality, sleep consistency, stress, the college experience, and life satisfaction. 

• There is a data set available for your own evaluation and some preliminary results. 

The survey has the following components: 

• Sleep Quality is measured by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. (Backhaus et al., 2002)

• Sleep Consistency is measured by questions developed for this survey. 

• Stress is measured by the College Student Stress Survey (Feldt, 2008). 

• Life Satisfaction is measured by the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS). (Robert et al., 1985)

• College Experience is measured by questions created for this survey. 

Instructions

1. First, complete the survey, which takes 10-15 minutes: Read and answer each question carefully. 

2. Click on this URL to take you to the survey:  Survey Link 

3. When you've completed the survey, click on this link to take you to a page that contains a pdf of the survey, an Excel spreadsheet with data collected on over participants (updated regularly), and graphs of some results. Results Link

4. You can use the spreadsheet to create and test hypotheses about the correlation between different components of the survey and differences between members of different demographics, such as gender or political leanings.