Validation of the Athlete Sleep Screening Questionnaire (ASSQ) in a student-athlete population

The proposed project is designed to address the gaps in knowledge as described above and critical issues by capturing a large amount of student-athlete sleep data using the Athlete Sleep Screening Questionnaire© (ASSQ©), which is a sleep screening questionnaire specifically designed for athletes. It is a highly efficient and convenient tool, given training and travel time constraints where polysomnography, the gold standard of objective sleep measurement is not feasible. The ASSQ© can be deployed online and provides clinical cutoff scores associated with specific clinical interventions to guide management of athletes’ sleep. The first step in acquiring accurate, valid and reliable information regarding the sleep behaviors of student-athletes is using the right tool for information gathering. The second step is deploying the tool efficiently to a wide population of specialized student-athletes. The third step is having the methods in place to capture, analyze and interpret the data. Finally, the interpretation of the data will provide interventions to improve the overall health, well-being and management of student-athletes over the course of their careers. The goal of this project is to continue gathering epidemiological data, refine the current systems that are in place to improve the quality of research that is being done on this topic.

Faculty Supervisor:

Penny Werthner

Student:

Jonathan Charest

Partner:

Centre for Sleep and Human Performance

Discipline:

Kinesiology

Sector:

Health care and social assistance

University:

University of Calgary