Self-reported sleep quality among elite athletes: what is it telling us?

Abstract

Background Sleep is often compromised in athletes. The monitoring of athlete’s sleep is an important preventative and educational tool. With many athletes using daily questionnaires to estimate sleep quality, there is a need to understand what this term is indicating when self-reported, and thus whether a self-report of this factor is useful. Aims This study aimed to compare self-reported and actigraph reported sleep quality, with a view to further understanding the constructs of this parameter. Methods Twenty-two national level female footballers provided a daily self-report of sleep quality (Likert scale) across 7 days, whilst also wearing an actigraph across the same testing period. Linear regression analysis was carried out to see which actigraph derived factors contributed to self-report score. Results The incorporation of SE, number of wakings and SFI could only account for 27.5% of variance in self-reported sleep quality scores. Number of wakings was the only significant predictor for self-reported sleep quality score (p = 0.000). Conclusions When asking for self-report of sleep quality, coaches should infer that number of wakings may be predicting for the Likert score given. Further discussion around this is advised, given the multifactorial nature of sleep quality and the potential for many contributing factors to affect scoring.