Impact of College on Sleep
Leona Kwong, Jasmine Mayor, Satu Debnath, Ryan Crimmins, Suity Bandyopadhyay
In order to study the effects of different factors of college on the sleep that college students got, we created an anonymous survey and asked Hunter College students to record their sleep patterns for a week. The survey included questions about the number of hours students slept every day, if they slept at home or at a dormitory, their workload throughout the week, if they had taken naps, and if they had diagnosed sleep conditions. We also asked qualitative questions about the quality of sleep students had during the pandemic compared to prior and at a dormitory compared to at home if applicable.
We were able to collect data points from two groups of people: students who slept only at home and students who slept both at the dorm and at home. Students who slept only at home slept an average of 6.24 hours a day. Students who slept both at the dorm and at home slept an average of 7 hours at home and 4.77 hours at the dorm. When calculating the overall data, students tended to sleep 6.29 hours at home and 4.77 hours at the dorm, which created a difference of 1.5 hours of sleep.
More than half of the students we surveyed have experienced communal living before. A large majority of the students reported a difference in quality or pattern of sleep between sleeping in the dorms compared to sleeping at home. Most of these students reported staying up later due to influence from friends or the commute. Influence from friends included either staying up to do work together or to hang out. Only one student reported sleeping earlier in a dormitory but reported a worse quality of sleep due to the noise or lights in the hallway
The pandemic also seemed to have affected the quality of sleep amongst students. Due to online classes, students reported being able to sleep for longer hours without a commute and also reported having to pull fewer all-nighters. However, students actually reported a lower quality of sleep with online classes due to no change in the environment. It was also more difficult for them to fall asleep at night without in-person classes, with most people falling asleep at 2 A.M.
To our surprise, tests and quizzes did not seem to have a huge impact on the students we surveyed. Although these are usually reported to be a big factor of stress for students, we could not see a correlation between the number of tests and quizzes or the amount of work a student felt they had compared to the number of hours of sleep they got. Of the factors we studied, living in a communal setting seemed to have the most negative impact on the amount of sleep that college students were able to get.
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