How does Sleep Impact Attention and Behavior for Teens in Foster Care?

Methods

Summary

This study involves teens in foster care who are ages 16 and older. Teens under age 18 will be enrolled with their caseworker’s consent. We plan to enroll 20 teens. Each teen who agrees to participate will complete two study visits. At Visit 1, teens will complete measures assessing their sleep and sleep habits, attention, and academic behaviors. Sleep and sleep habits will be assessed using the Sleep Habits Survey (SHS; Wolfson & Carskadon, 1998; Wolfson et al., 2003). Attention and related behaviors (e.g., oppositionality) will be assessed using the Conners-3 Self-Report (Conners, 2008) and the Child Concentration Inventory (CCI; Becker, 2015). Self-regulation, an important correlate of attention, will be assessed using the Adolescent Self-Regulatory Inventory (ASRI; Moilanen, 2007). Academic behaviors will be assessed using the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS; Vallerand et al., 1992), items from the SHS (e.g., How many hours did you study this week?), and reports of grades in school and completed assignments in school and for homework. Additionally, participants will complete grade-benchmarked math and reading tasks which will be coded for completion (i.e., how long to complete task, number if items completed) and accuracy (i.e., number of correct items). At the end of Visit 1, participants will be provided with an actigraph that they will wear for two weeks, during which teens will also complete a daily Sleep-Wake Diary (Manber, Bootzin, Acebo, & Carskadon, 1996). Visit 2 will occur at the end of this two-week period, at which time the Sleep-Wake Diary and actigraph will be collected, and teens will again complete the SHS, the ADHD Rating Scale, the ASRI, and measures of academic behaviors.

Challenges

The biggest challenge with this project will be collecting complete sleep data from all participants. Actigraphs are very reliable, but sometimes fail to collect data, or participants forget to wear them. As we have successfully done in other studies, we will minimize the potential for risk by coaching participants and providing reminders to help them remember to wear them. Additionally, we are including self-report measures and daily diaries to supplement actigraphy data. Finally, we are gathering data for two weeks, to ensure that we have multiple sleep observations from each participant.

Pre Analysis Plan

We hypothesize that poorer sleep functioning (e.g., shorter sleep duration, poorer sleep habits, greater sleep variability) will be associated with greater attention problems, less self-regulation, and poorer academic behaviors among teens in foster care after we account for demographic variables like gender and length of time in foster care. Once data are processed and coded, we will examine descriptive statistics to understand the range of sleep and types of sleep habits experienced by teens in foster care. We will then use SAS to analyze associations among sleep, attention, and academic behaviors via multiple linear regression.