Association Between Screen Time and Sleep: An Online Survey

The relationship between electronic devices and poor sleep quality has raised concern among young adults. In this study, the associations between weekday screen time and sleep latency, sleep duration, and sleep quality were examined through a sample of undergraduate college students. 40 students from a large public university in the United States completed an online Qualtrics survey, where they were asked about their typical weekday and weeknight screen use through questions derived from a Screen-Time Questionnaire and the Brief-Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, a sleep quality measurement scale. Pearson correlations were conducted on 29 of the responses to test the relationships between total weekday screen time and sleep duration, total weekday screen time and sleep quality, and between total weeknight screen time and sleep latency. The results indicate that total weekday screen time and poor sleep quality had a moderate positive association, meaning that the longer the screen time, the worse one's sleep quality was. Associations between sleep latency and sleep duration were not significant. These findings suggest that greater weekday screen exposure may be associated with the quality of one's sleep, versus the duration or latency of their sleep. Limitations to our research include non-probability sampling (convenience sampling) and self-reported measurements of screen time. Future research should obtain representative samples and employ objective measures to track sleep quality, latency, and duration.NOTE: This manuscript was produced as a course-based research project for instructional purposes only. Data collection was conducted solely for educational training in research methods and was not intended for external dissemination, clinical inference, or generalization.