Background

We went to www.google.com to start our research. We first searched “gender sleep studies” and “relationships between gender and sleep among high schoolers”, and found several studies that said that women tend to get more sleep on average compared to men. Most of these studies were on adult men and women so we started searching “adolescent sleep study” and “adolescent gender and sleep”. Then, we were able to see results of studies done on adolescents that were closer to the ages in our study. The best studies we found are included in the links below:

Our first article, “Gender and Time for Sleep among U.S. Adults”, showed the relationship among gender and sleep with adults ages 18 to 64. It also detailed how much time each gender spent doing paid and unpaid work, having leisure time, and sleeping. They used data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), with 56,149 respondents. The study concluded that women get more sleep in general, with women getting an average of 508 minutes per night and men with an average of 496 minutes per night, but said that men tend to get higher quality sleep. This was the largest study we found in our research and was the most detailed. While its focus was not primarily sleep, it had valuable information nonetheless. <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4164903/>

The second article, “Who Gets More Sleep: Men or Women?”, used data from the National Sleep Foundation. People ages 18 to 75 were used in the study from multiple countries. The study found that in most countries, women got more sleep than men and it averaged to about 20 more minutes per night. The study stated that teenagers were getting more sleep than adults in the United States, but in countries such as China and Japan, this was the opposite. While this study was very helpful, our study is going to look at high school aged students. <https://jawbone.com/blog/who-gets-more-sleep-men-or-women/>

Our third article, “School Start Time and Adolescent Sleep Patterns: Results From the US National Comorbidity Survey—Adolescent Supplement”, used a survey of 7,308 students aged 13 to 17 years attending 245 different schools in the United States to determine if school start time influenced amount of sleep on weeknights. The study compared results with respect to gender and the population of the cities where the schools were from. It found that the mean hours of sleep on a school night was 7.60 for girls and 7.81 for boys. This contrasts with the previous studies we researched, however, it more accurately captures our population of interest because of the age range of students used in the survey. This study was most relevant to our own study. <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4463387/>

Our final article, “Gender differences in the sleep habits of 11-13 year olds”, looked at the sleep habits of 200 Brazilian middle schoolers. The study compared sleep habits of students with morning and afternoon classes on weekends and weeknights using a questionnaire. This study was less relevant than the last study because of the age range and all the students surveyed are from Brazil. Overall, the study found that boys received a few more minutes of sleep each night than girls. <http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516-44462009000400013>

The studies we looked into gave us mixed results. The two studies with sample groups closest to ours showed that women got less sleep than men on average. The studies on adults showed that women slept more than men. All of these studies used surveys, as we also will in our study. Our study differs from the last two we researched in that we will look at one school that has a uniform start time for its students. With our study we can also determine if sleep differs between grade levels.