Aims
Sleep duration is one of the attributes of its quality that affects productivity during the working day and physical and mental health. Numerous studies have shown that sleep duration significantly impacts a person’s life. A healthy human should sleep 7-8 hours, and marginal values can lead to undesirable consequences (Chaput et al., 2020). For the purposes of this study, a statistical assessment of sleep duration among 49 students was of interest. The purpose of this paper was to determine if students are taking adequate time to sleep or if they may be experiencing adverse health consequences.
Data Collection
This paper was based on a cross-sectional study that sought to capture the current status of sleep duration among students. Using a convenience nonprobability sampling algorithm, a request to participate in the study was sent to each student through an acquaintance of the author. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Telegram were used to spread the invitation. The candidate for participation was briefly told the goals and objectives of the research project, and their gender and average sleep duration were surveyed. Data were recorded in an MS Excel spreadsheet and used for statistical analysis; the raw data are shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Raw data collected from respondents
Visualization
The resulting data were used to obtain visual representations. Figure 1 shows a histogram of the distribution of sleep duration without reference to gender. As the figure below shows, equal numbers of people (n = 13) spent 5.1 to 6.3 and 8.7 to 9.8 hours sleeping. At the same time, people slept the least (n = 7), from 7.5 to 8.7 and 9.8 to 11.0 hours per night. Overall, the distribution was not normal and was asymmetrical, with no clear observable pattern.
Figure 2 provides information on the gender distribution of participants. As the data show, 31 participants (63.3%) were male, and 18 respondents (36.7%) were female. Linking the information on life expectancy and the gender of the participants allows us to construct Figure 3, which shows the average sleep duration for males and females. Based on these results, one can see that women spent more time sleeping (t1 = 8.05) than men (t2 = 7.81).
Calculations
Descriptive statistics must be used to analyze the data obtained. Measures of central tendency include mean, median, and mode; measures of variability include standard deviation and range, but they are not limited to them. Equations [1] and [2] show all the necessary calculations. The data were sorted to calculate the median, and the 25th percentile was used as the median.
Description
Statistical analysis showed that students averaged 7.9 hours of sleep (SD = 1.8). The range was 5.9 hours of sleep, with a maximum of 11.0 and a minimum of 5.1. In addition, female students were found to sleep an average of 14.1 minutes more than male students. Potential sources of data error included the self-reported nature of the collection. Respondents self-reported their sleep times, and the data were not verified. In addition, the cross-sectional nature of the study implied a time slice and did not account for the effects of additional factors affecting sleep duration.
Interpretation
The purpose of this study was to obtain data on the average sleep duration of student respondents. The data showed that students, on average, slept a healthy amount of time, falling within the time frame of the published evidence, namely 7.9 hours. Notably, the averages were not accurate in describing sleep patterns because there were a large number of people in the sample who slept less than seven hours and those who slept more than eight hours. This indicates that students are characterized by unhealthy sleep duration, the consequences of which can be a decline in health, academic productivity, and motivation.
Thus, one implication of the results is the need to promote healthy sleep among the student body and raise awareness of the need to sleep an average number of hours. In the future, it is proposed to expand the number of variables, such as using students’ age to assess the correlation between them. In addition, a longitudinal study is proposed to test the dynamics of sleep duration over time.
Reference
Chaput, J. P., Dutil, C., Featherstone, R., Ross, R., Giangregorio, L., Saunders, T. J., & Carrier, J. (2020). Sleep duration and health in adults: An overview of systematic reviews. Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, 45(10), S218-S231. Web.