Search

Background The potential relationships between sleep–wake behaviors and emotional/disruptive problems in otherwise healthy school-aged children are unclear. Methods A parental questionnaire was developed for the epidemiologic survey of children’s sleep and wake behavioral patterns. The questions covered a wide range of features including sleep length (school days, weekends), time to fall asleep, night awakenings, bedtime and nighttime sleep-related behaviors, daytime sleepiness, irritability, and tiredness. To assess psychiatric symptomatology, the Rutter Scale B2 was completed by teachers. In addition to the total score, sub-scores of emotional, hyperactivity, and conduct problems were obtained. The representative population sample comprised 779 children (403 girls), with an age range of 6–11 years. Results Hyperactivity and conduct problems at school in boys were both associated with parental reports of bedtime resistance. Hyperactivity was also associated with longer sleep duration during weekends. Conduct and emotional problems in girls were associated with earlier bedtime during school days. Emotional problems in girls were also associated with longer sleep durations in school days and weekends. Conclusion Bedtime resistance was the only sleep behavior associated with either hyperactivity or conduct problems in children, and longer sleep durations appear to occur more frequently in children with both hyperactive or emotional problems. Information about good sleep hygiene at bedtime may help parents setting sleep limits.

Introduction The present work aims to characterize in higher education students the reliability and validity of a brief self-reported measure to assess insomnia complaints and perceived sleep quality (Gomes et al., 2001, 2005, 2011), used from more than a decade by our research team members, and henceforth labeled the Brief Insomnia and Quality of Sleep Scale (BIQSS). Materials and methods In study 1, the 7-items scale now termed BIQSS was developed, as part of a larger self-response questionnaire on higher education sleep-wake patterns, and its internal consistency and item homogeneity were analyzed based on the answers of 1654 undergraduates. In study 2, focused mainly on validity, 323 undergraduate and master degree students completed the BIQSS together with the PSQI (Buysse et al., 1989). Using an additional question on perceived sleep problems, item discriminative power and ROC analyses were also performed. Higher BIQSS scores equate to poorer sleep, and each item is rated in a 5 point scale from 0 to 4 (or in reversed way when appropriate), thus total score may range from 0 to 28. Results Internal consistency was assessed by Chronbach alpha, which was.73 in study 1 and .78 in study 2. Corrected item-total correlations ranged from .32 to .57 (study 1), and from .40 to .60 (study 2). All items contributed to the internal consistency of the scale, as shown by drops in Chronbach alpha values when excluding each item. As to validity (study 2), the correlation coefficient between the BIQSS and the PSQI score was r = 0.65 (p 0,001). Students that reported a sleep problem (n = 40) obtained significantly higher BIQSS scores in comparison to those who deny having any sleep problem, and all items were able to discriminate between them. In ROC analysis, the Area Under the Curve (AUC) was .832, indicating moderate precision/acuity. Conclusion The BIQSS is composed by a small number of items, is very easy to administer in higher education students, and seems to possess reasonable reliability, validity, and acuity. Therefore, it may constitute a convenient tool to screen for insomnia and poor sleep complaints, both for research purposes and in clinical settings. Further studies are now needed in other samples. Acknowledgements Successive research studies leading to the present work have been supported by different entities: Dep. of Education – Univ. Aveiro; Projects LEIES (FCG), SPASHE (FCT); Research Unit CCPSF and CIECC (FCT).