1. An Analysis of the Sleep Quality of Undergraduate Students
Brianna Carter, BSPH candidate, Department of Community Health & Behavior, Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health
Joanne Chopak-Foss, Associate Professor, Department of Community Health & Behavior, Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health, Chapter sponsor; Gamma Upsilon Chapter
Fadzai Punungwe, DrPH candidate, Department of Community Health & Behavior, Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health

2. Background
Sleep is necessary to fight off infection, support the metabolism, perform well in school, and be effective at work (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2013). 
Studies have shown that sleep plays a critical role in immune function, metabolism, memory, learning, and other vital functions (Ganz, 2012; Harvard Medical School, 2008; Kronholm, et al., 2009; Lo, Dijk, Groeger, 2014; Morseli, Guyon & Spiegel, 2012;Yang et al., 2014).

3. Background Continued
College students are at high risk for not getting enough sleep.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, college students can need up to 8.5 to 9.5 (National Sleep Foundation, 2014).
However, Orzech, Salafsky, and Hamilton (2011) reported daily hours of sleep below the recommended hours. Forquer, Camden, Gabriau and Johnson (2008) report:
Experienced frequent night waking, short sleep time, long sleep latencies, and a disrupted circadian rhythm due to later bedtimes and wake times on the weekends than weekdays

4. Problem and Purpose
For college students, sleep deprivation and poor quality sleep has been linked to GPA, academic performance, and learning capabilities.
Linked to depression (Garlow 2008), substance abuse (Singleton & Wolfson, 2009) , and prescription drug abuse ((Arria, 2011)
The purpose of this study was to measure the sleep quality of a sample of undergraduate students and compare it to the recommendations for young adults from the National Sleep Foundation.

5. Methods Descriptive, cross-sectional design Qualtrics survey software
The sampling methodology employed was a nonprobability, sample of convenience.  
Participants were recruited through: flyers, Facebook, and .

6. Participants 105 students
Only 86 completed the survey
The sample was overrepresented by females (80% & 20%)
Age range: 18–27 years. A total of
50% of the students were Caucasians/White,
44% were Black/African American
6% identified themselves as other.
The majority of the respondents were seniors (40%), followed by juniors (24%), sophomores (22%), and freshmen (14%)

7. Results The mean PSQI score for the sample (N=58) was 9.47.
8% reported their sleep quality as ‘very good’ was 8% compared to
63% rated their sleep quality as ‘fairly good’. 28% of the respondents rated their sleep quality as ‘fairly bad’.
Half of the students (51.2%) reported getting under 7 hours per night,
Only 8.1% reported sleeping 8.5 hours or longer.  
The average number of minutes it took to fall asleep minutes.

8. Results Continued
Significant correlations were found for the following variables
sleep disturbance and sleep efficiency,
sleep latency and sleep duration
needing medication to sleep and overall sleep quality
sleep duration and overall sleep quality

9. Discussion
The results of the study showed that there was a disconnect between the students’ perceptions of their overall quality of sleep and the global score of the PSQI.
A total of 70% of the students reported having ‘very good’ to ‘fairly good’ sleep quality which is similar to the results found by Orzech et al. (2011).
However, the mean PSQI score in this study indicated that the students had ‘poor’ sleep quality.

10. Discussion Continued
Predictably, the undergraduate students reported getting fewer than seven hours of sleep over the past month (51%), which is higher than the results of Lund and colleagues (2010)
These students had less than the hours of recommended sleep each night for college students to function at their best (National Sleep Foundation, 2014).
Sleep duration can be a predictor of one’s health status.
Diabetes, obesity, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, etc ((Altman et al, 2012; Najafian et al., 2013)

11. Limitations Small non-randomized sample size (N=86) was obtained.
Larger proportion of females, seniors, and a narrow range of racial and ethnic differences.
Listwise deletion method was used to account for the missing data to allow comparisons across the variables using the nonparametric correlations.
Made the sample size analyzed even smaller.
Results from the study could not be generalized to the larger undergraduate population.

12. Recommendations
The study found similar results to other large-scale studies which used the PSQI instrument to examine the sleep quality in college students (Gaultney, 2010; Orzech, 2011).  
Employing a mixed-methods approach
The use of incentives might help boost response rates.
Examining the relationship of sleep quality among undergraduate students at different points of time in the academic school year

13. References
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