Document Type
Honors Paper
Advisor
Ann Devlin
Publication Date
2022
Abstract
The present study investigated the relationship between social media posting behavior and sleep quality in a population of college students (N = 30) over 5 nights. Sleep duration and number of nightly disruptions were used to measure sleep quality using a smartphone app, SleepScore, that participants downloaded prior to the study. Every day after recording their sleep participants were presented with a “prompt word” and asked to make a post related to their respective prompt on the anonymous social media network Yik-Yak. A content analysis was then performed with the assistance of an independent coder in order to categorize the posts according to common themes and rate them on a scale of perceived negativity/positivity. I hypothesized that students who experience a poorer quality of sleep will subsequently make posts on Yik-Yak that would be perceived more negatively by the raters. While this hypothesis was not supported, a significant difference was observed in the relationship between the gender of the participant and how negative their posts are, with males writing more negative Yik-Yak posts than females. Existing literature regarding gender disparities in social media behavior is discussed.
Recommended Citation
Moskowitz, Isaac, "The Relationship Between Sleep Quality and Social Media Content" (2022). Psychology Honors Papers. 88.
https://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/psychhp/88
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The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author.