Research articleSufficient Sleep, Physical Activity, and Sedentary Behaviors
Section snippets
Sample and Survey Administration
Data for the current study were from the 2009 national school-based Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS). The YRBS was developed by the CDC to monitor the prevalence of priority health risk behaviors among youth and has been conducted biennially since 1991. In 2009, a three-stage cluster sample design was used to obtain a nationally representative sample of students in Grades 9 through 12. Sampling strategies and psychometric properties of the questionnaire have been reported elsewhere.32, 33, 34
Demographic Characteristics of the Study Sample and Prevalence of Sufficient Sleep
The sample was 52.5% male and most students were white (61.4%); students were fairly evenly distributed by grade (Table 1). The prevalence of sufficient sleep overall among U.S. high school students was 30.9%. The prevalence of sufficient sleep was higher among male than female students; higher among Hispanic than white and black students and students of other races/ethnicities; and higher among white students than students of other races/ethnicities. All pairwise comparisons by grade were
Discussion
The current study found that fewer than one in three (30.9%) U.S. high school students get sufficient sleep on school nights, similar to what has been reported elsewhere.5, 36 Associations between the number of days that students were physically active for at least 60 minutes and sufficient sleep were attenuated when demographic and risk behavior variables were included as controls, indicating the importance of controlling for these factors in future studies. Importantly, however, the adjusted
Conclusion
Insufficient sleep is an often unrecognized contributor to adolescent health and behavior problems. The results of the present study show, however, that adolescents who engage in at least 60 minutes of physical activity daily are more likely to get sufficient sleep, providing yet another reason to endorse daily physical activity. The finding that students who use a computer or play video games 2 or more hours/day are less likely to get sufficient sleep suggests that implementing strategies to
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