Context: Sleep Quality and Social Media Study

There have been recent concerns that young people's sleep patterns are negatively affected by screen time late at night. A researcher conducted a correlational study to investigate the relationship between the time spent on social media in the hour before bed and daytime fatigue in college students.

The researcher obtained an opportunity sample of 10 students, aged 17 to 18 years, from a local college. Each student self-reported the average time (in minutes) spent actively scrolling or interacting on social media apps during the hour prior to turning out their lights to sleep over a typical week.

Each student also completed an online questionnaire about daytime tiredness and cognitive focus, which yielded a score for daytime fatigue. The fatigue questionnaire was scored out of 50, where a low score indicated low fatigue (feeling alert and refreshed) and a high score indicated high fatigue (feeling very tired during the day).

The raw data collected in the study are shown in Table 1 below.

Table 1 The average minutes spent on social media before bed and daytime fatigue scores of 10 students