Sleep Quality of Residential Degree College Students During COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Twenty first century residential educational institutions in India provide quality education and huge scope for overall personality development of talented candidates from marginalized communities. We hypothesized that a well-structured and protected lifestyle in these institutes wouldn’t give rise to sleep problems. This study aimed to study the prevalence of poor sleep quality among marginalized women in social welfare residential degree colleges. We assessed Sleep quality of 805 female college students (18-25 years) using Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) pre and post a non-interventional COVID-19 interval of twelve months. Initial assessment during 2020, revealed 65% (N=805) and a later assessment of the same students in 2021 revealed 52% (N=1252) prevalence of poor sleep quality among healthy girls. There is a need to address sleep health issues through proper interventions to enable better functioning in academics and highly goal oriented co-curricular endeavors of social welfare institutes.