[Comparative study of children's sleep evaluation methods].

Objective: To compare the compliance of using Actiwatch, parent report of sleep diary and sleep questionnaire in school age children, and to further evaluate agreement rates between actigraphy, diary, and questionnaire for children's sleep patterns.

Method: Two primary schools in Luwan District were selected and first grade students without obvious physical and mental illnesses or sleep disorders were enrolled in the study. Each student was home-monitored with an Actiwatch for 7 days, meanwhile parents were asked to complete a detailed sleep diary during the Actiwatch monitoring days. Sleep questionnaires were distributed to their parents who were asked to fill in these on the last monitoring day.

Result: Forty-five children participated in the study, 36 children completed sleep assessments by all the three methods, and among them 20 were boys and 16 were girls. The mean age of those children was (7.26±0.42) years. The completion rate of questionnaire was 100%, of diary was 86.7% (39/45) and of Actiwatch was 93.3% (42/45). The completion rate between sleep diary and sleep questionnaire was significantly different (P<0.05). The satisfactory agreement between Actiwatch and sleep diary was reached with sleep diary overestimating weekday and weekend sleep duration by 26 minutes and 25 minutes respectively. The agreement rates between Actiwatch and questionnaire was insufficient for all variables with sleep questionnaire overestimating weekday and weekend sleep duration by 37 minutes and 38 minutes respectively.

Conclusion: Sleep questionnaire is an easy and high compliance method for evaluating children's sleep pattern while sleep diary showed high agreement with Actiwatch. Using either of these methods for evaluating children's sleep pattern should be judged by research aim and sample size, and limitation of those methods should be considered when they are used in practice.