Introduction
Questionnaires measuring sleep quality are useful in many studies. This because quality of sleep can affect emotion and performance during the day.
The Groningen Sleep Quality Questionnaire Meijman et al., 1988,1990 is a well established scale and measures simply the quality of last night’s sleep. This makes it useful in, for example, diary studies. It takes just a minute to fill in and it has simply yes/no answers.
| The original studies are hard to find. This PsyToolkit page is based on the study of Sirous and colleagues (2008). |
Scores and interpretation
The scale can range between 0 and 14 points (note that item one is not counted).
According to a more recent study by Sirous and colleagues (2008), a score of 6 or higher indicates poor sleep in the past night. Of course, whether this might just be a one off. If you want to know if people truely have a disturbed sleep pattern, you need to measure this more than once and probably also use another sleep quality scale.
Run the demo
Legal stuff
It seems that the GSQS can be used for research, but you need to acknowledge the authors and their research paper when writing about it (Meijman et al., 1990).
Technically
This is a simple yes/no questionnaire with reversed items coded in.
The survey code for PsyToolkit
## Groningen Sleep Quality Scale
scale: tf
- {score=1} True
- {score=0} False
l: gsqs
t: scale tf
o: buildup
q: Select true or false for the items below.
- I had a deep sleep last night
- I feel like I slept poorly last night
- It took me more than half an hour to fall asleep last night
- I felt tired after waking up this morning
- I woke up several times last night
- I feel like I didn’t get enough sleep last night
- I got up in the middle of the night
- {reverse} I felt rested after waking up this morning
- I feel like I only had a couple hours of sleep last night
- {reverse} I feel I slept well last night
- I didn’t sleep a wink last night
- {reverse} I didn’t have any trouble falling asleep last night
- After I woke up last night, I had trouble falling asleep again
- I tossed and turned all night last night
- I didn’t get more than 5 hours sleep last night
l: gsqsScore
t: set
- calc $gsqs.2 + $gsqs.3 + $gsqs.4 + $gsqs.5 + $gsqs.6 + $gsqs.7 + $gsqs.8 + $gsqs.9 + $gsqs.10 + $gsqs.11 + $gsqs.12 + $gsqs.13 + $gsqs.14 + $gsqs.15
l: feedback
t: info
q: Your score on the GSQS is {$gsqsScore}
A score of 6 or higher is a sign of poor sleep.
It is recommended you carry this scale our two weeks in a row and see if you sleep poorly regularly.
References
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Meijman, T. F., de Vries-Griever, A. H., de Vries, G. (1988): The evaluation of the Groningen Sleep Quality Scale. Groningen: Heymans Bulletin (HB 88—13—EX).
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Meijman, T. F., Thunnissen, M. J., & de Vries-Griever, A. G. H. (1990). The after-effects of a prolonged period of day-sleep on subjective sleep quality. Work & Stress, 4(1), 65–70.
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Sirous, J., Gorouhi, F., Taghva, A., Lotfi, J. (2008). High-altitude sleep disturbance: Results of the Groningen Sleep Quality Questionnaire survey. Sleep Medicine, Volume 9, Issue 4, 446-449. Link to paper