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Availability of a simple self-report sleep questionnaire for 9- to 12-year-old children

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Abstract

Self-report questionnaires about sleep habits are useful for population-based studies because of their low cost. However, there is no valid and reliable self-report sleep questionnaire for elementary school-aged children. The aim of this study was to examine the availability of a simple self-report sleep questionnaire for 9- to 12-year-old children. Participants were 58 children aged 9–12 years from one elementary school in a rural area of Japan. Participants wore an accelerometer for 10 consecutive days and completed the sleep questionnaire twice. Sleep measures included bedtime, wake time, and assumed and actual sleep duration on weekdays and weekends. The data obtained from the accelerometer and sleep/wake scoring software were used to assess criterion validity. Pearson correlation coefficients and Bland-Altman plots were used to evaluate the relationships between objective and self-reported sleep measures. Test-retest reliability was evaluated using intraclass correlation coefficients. The correlations between the objective and questionnaire measures were moderate to high (r = 0.45 to 0.90) and significant, except girls’ wake time, assumed sleep duration, and actual sleep duration on weekends. The Bland-Altman plots indicated that bedtime and wake time obtained from the questionnaire were underestimated for both weekdays and weekends. Test-retest reliability of the questionnaire was high, with intraclass coefficients ranging from 0.71 to 0.99. Although caution should be exercised when evaluating sleep duration on weekends, this simple self-reported sleep questionnaire is a useful tool for assessing sleep habits in 9- to 12-year-old children, particularly in school-based and large-scale epidemiological studies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Nursing, Yamanashi Prefectural University, 1-6-1 Ikeda, Kofu, Yamanashi, 4000062, Japan

    Mitsuya Yamakita

  2. Department of Health Sciences, Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Medicine and Engineering, University of Yamanashi, Chuo, Yamanashi, Japan

    Mitsuya Yamakita, Kohta Suzuki & Zentaro Yamagata

  3. Center for Birth Cohort Studies, Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Medicine and Engineering, University of Yamanashi, Chuo, Yamanashi, Japan

    Miri Sato & Zentaro Yamagata

  4. Department of Physical Education, National Defense Academy, Yokosuka, Kanagawa, Japan

    Daisuke Ando

Authors
  1. Mitsuya Yamakita
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  2. Miri Sato
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  3. Daisuke Ando
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  4. Kohta Suzuki
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  5. Zentaro Yamagata
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Correspondence to Mitsuya Yamakita.

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Conflicts of interest: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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Yamakita, M., Sato, M., Ando, D. et al. Availability of a simple self-report sleep questionnaire for 9- to 12-year-old children. Sleep Biol. Rhythms 12, 279–288 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1111/sbr.12072

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