Correlates of Sleep Quality: A Pilot Descriptive Cross-Sectional Survey among Undergraduate Students in a Ghanaian University

A gap exists in evidence of the association between sleep quality and the academic performance of university students in sub-Saharan Africa. A limited number of studies have been conducted in this regard, which have mainly focused on medical students, thus neglecting the larger population of undergraduate non-medical students.

This pilot study evaluated the correlates of sleep quality and the academic performance of 500 randomly sampled undergraduate non-medical students at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. Data was collected using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and a demographic questionnaire. The par-ticipants' demographic characteristics, academic performance, and sleep quality were first analyzed, descriptively, using SPSS software. Relationships between participants’ sleep quality and demographic factors, and sleep quality and aca-demic performance were determined using Spearman’s rank correlation. The causation between these variables was then determined using simple linear regression.

Poor quality of sleep was prevalent among undergraduate students with a mean (SD) PSQI score of 6.43 (2.78). The respondent’s sleep quality had a weak correlation with their academic performance (rs = -0.146; P = 0.001), although poor quality of sleep was a predictor of academic performance [R2 = 0.022; 95% CI (-0.640, -0.168)].

Health education and sleep promotion interventions should be used to encourage good sleep quality and practices among students. Furthermore, the findings point to the need for further studies using a larger population.