Korea University Study Shows Educational Attainment Affected By Adolescent Sleep Quality And Quantity
Adolescent sleep quality and quantity turned out to have an effect on educational attainment in adulthood.
Sleep in adolescents not only affects their health and academic achievement, but also results in long-lasting effects during adulthood. As a result, adolescent sleep has emerged as an important developmental issue, and many studies on its effects have been conducted recently.
Professor Jinho Kim at the Division of Health Policy and Management of the College of Health Science worked with Professor Angelina Sutin at the College of Medicine of Florida State University to identify the effects of adolescent sleep quality and quantity on educational attainment in adulthood. Their research results were published in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, a renowned academic journal in the field of developmental psychology (IF=8.982, top 0.649% (1/78)).
This study used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to include 3,303 male and female respondents who were longitudinally followed up for 22 years from adolescence to early adulthood. The study adopted a sibling fixed effect approach that takes into account unobserved family background factors, such as genetics and social environment.
The analysis of the study showed a significant relationship between sleep quality and quantity in adolescence and educational attainment in adulthood, even after controlling for unobserved family-level heterogeneity. More specifically, short sleep duration (sleeping 6 or fewer hours per night) for boys and poor sleep quality (trouble falling or staying asleep) for girls remained associated with educational attainment in adulthood.
The research team identified that the mechanisms underlying the observed associations worked differently by gender. In the case of boys, educational factors (college aspiration and grade point average), student-teacher relationships, and psychological factors (school attachment and depressive symptoms) partially explained the relationship between short sleep duration and educational attainment. On the other hand, for girls, education-related factors (college aspiration and school effort) were the only mediators between low sleep quality and educational attainment.
Professor Kim from Korea University, the corresponding and first authors of the study, said, “The findings of this study suggest that sleep problems in adolescence, a critical period in physical, social and cognitive development, have long-lasting effects on adulthood life. This implies that adolescent sleep problems should be considered from a life-cycle perspective, rather than as a short, one-off event.” He further reiterated the significance of the findings, saying, “In addition, the results show that not only different sleep factors but also different underlying mechanisms affect educational attainment by gender, which means that gender should be considered when developing and implementing intervention measures for adolescent sleep problems.”