A novel subjective sleep assessment tool for healthy elementary school children in Japan

Abstract

Background: A child's sleep pattern is important in defining his or her mental and physical well-being. Although we have reported previously on the utility of collecting 2 weeks of daily sleep logs, this type of record keeping is often onerous for the parents. Therefore, we established a new questionnaire, called the Japan Children's Study Sleep Questionnaire (JCSSQ), which is used to collect sleep pattern data over 4 weeks, including weekdays, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays.

Methods: Two parent-administered sleep assessment tools, the JCSSQ and a daily sleep log, were used to examine the sleeping patterns of 105 school children (58 boys and 47 girls; age range, 6-12 years) in Fukuoka, Japan. Parents were requested to record sleep logs for 14 days after the JCSSQ. Sleep/wake status was recorded on the sleep log, from which data on the parameters of "sleep onset time", "waking time", "sleep period", and "number of nights waking" were extracted.

Results: There were no significant differences between the JCSSQ and the logs for waking time data collected on weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. However, there was a significant difference (P = 0.03) between the JCSSQ and the sleep logs with respect to the sleep onset time data collected on Saturdays.

Conclusions: The JCSSQ was easy to fill out, and the data collected using the JCSSQ on weekdays were both valid and generally consistent with those collected using sleep logs. However, for sampling on Saturdays and Sundays, the JCSSQ data did not correlate with the sleep log data.

Figure 1.. The Japan Children’s Study Sleep Questionnaire (JCSSQ). Waking time and sleep onset time were recorded separately for weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays (or holidays). Parents were requested to complete the JCSSQ.

Figure 2.. Cumulative plot and frequencies of the differences in sleep onset times. The distributions of the sleep onset times, which showed differences of less than 30 min between the sleep logs and JCSSQ, were 81.9%, 54.3%, and 64.8%, for the weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, respectively.