The Relationship Between Sleep Quality and Social Media Content

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