Introduction

Sleep quality affects many psychological processes. Therefore, we often need to know how well participants sleep. Many sleep quality questionnaires are too long. This SQS with just one item can help, and it’s reliability and validity have been tested.

The validation piggy-backed on drug trials and lacked a placebo arm explicitly designed for reliability testing; the insomnia sample was small (n≈70). Results are strong but not the last word.

Understanding scores

The score on this scale runs from 0 ("terrible") to 10 ("excellent") sleep quality. Table 4 of the paper (Snyder et all, 2018) shows aveages and further the papers compares scores to the PSQI (Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index).

In this study, all participants were from "clinical" samples (one with chronic insomnia and one with major depressive disorder). This means that we do not know what people without any psychological/clinical problems and with "normal" sleep would score exactly.

That said, in many studies you would use the score on this scale as a correlate/covariate to explain variation in another variable (e.g., attention on one of our tasks). For example, we know that there is a strong link with performance on the Psychomotor Vigilance Task, which you can run on PsyToolkit.

Run the demo

Click here to run a demo of the survey

The survey code for PsyToolkit

This is a scale with "two levels". On the top of the boxes you have the words from "Terrible", "Poor", Fair", "Food", "Excellent" and at the bottom of the boxes you have the numbers 0 to 10. We use HTML codes <B> for bold (and </B> for ending the bold text). The <BR> is HTML code for new line. In HTML all "codes" are within the < and > sign.
Copy and paste this code to your PsyToolkit account if you want to use the scale in your own online research project
scale: sqsItems
- <B>Terrible</B><BR>0
- <B>Poor</B><BR>1
- <B>Poor</B><BR>2
- <B>Poor</B><BR>3
- <B>Fair</B><BR>4
- <B>Fair</B><BR>5
- <B>Fair</B><BR>6
- <B>Good</B><BR>7
- <B>Good</B><BR>8
- <B>Good</B><BR>9
- <B>Excellent</B><BR>10

l: sqs1
t: scale sqsItems
q: The following question refers to your overall sleep quality for the <b>majority</b> of nights in the <b>past 7 days ONLY</b>.
<BR>
Please think about the quality of your sleep <b>overall</b>, such as how many hours of sleep you got, how easily you feel asleep, how often you woke up during the night (except to go to the bathroom), how often you woke up earlier than you had to in the morning, and how refreshing your sleep was.
- During the <b>past 7 days</b>, how would you rate your sleep quality overall?

References

  • Snyder, E., Cai, B., DeMuro, C., Morrison, M. F., & Ball, W. (2018). A new single-item sleep quality scale: results of psychometric evaluation in patients with chronic primary insomnia and depression. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 14(11), 1849-1857. Read full article for free here