Empirical validation of a short version of the Adolescent Sleep-Wake Scale using a sample of ethnically diverse adolescents from an economically disadvantage community

Abstract

Objective: There is a need for brief, psychometrically sound instruments to assess adolescent sleep, particularly for ethnic minority and economically disadvantaged adolescents. A 10-item short version of the Adolescent Sleep-Wake Scale was recently proposed based upon exploratory factor analysis with primarily Caucasian healthy adolescents from middle- to high-income families. The aim of this study was to expand the utility of the short version of the Adolescent Sleep-Wake Scale by investigating the empirical and construct validity of the measure on an ethnically diverse sample of adolescents from an economically disadvantaged community.

Materials and methods: Participants included 467 adolescents (40% African American, 35.5% Caucasian, 16.5% Latino, and 7.9% multiethnic), aged 12-18 years (mean = 15.27 years, SD = 1.96 years), who completed the Adolescent Sleep-Wake Scale. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted with Mplus 7 based on the three-factor solution proposed by Essner et al. (2014).

Results: CFA indicated that the three-factor structure was a good fit for the data (χ(2) (29) = 52.053, p = 0.005, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.04, CFI = 0.98, TLI = 0.96, standardized root mean residuals (SRMR) = 0.03), and factor loadings for each item were >0.40. Cronbach's alphas by ethnicity indicated that the scale has acceptable reliability (0.70 ≤ α ≤ 0.90) for African American, Caucasian, and multiethnic adolescents, but not for Latino adolescents.

Conclusion: Our results support the use of the Adolescent Sleep-Wake Scale short form for the majority of ethnic minority and economically disadvantaged adolescents.

Keywords: Ethnic disparities; Ethnic minority; Inadequate sleep; Sleep measure; Wakefulness; Youth.

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