Reports of research work funded by grants prior to 2015

University of Otago Wellington

Goodnight Kiwi: Kei te moe ngā tamariki? [Are The Children Sleeping?]

DE Elder
Department of Paediatrics and Child Health

This equipment grant is to be used to assist with the purchasing of actiwatches to measure sleep quality in school children in a research project based in the Department of Paediatrics & Child Health at the University of Otago Wellington.

We have placed orders for the actiwatches but the manufactures have reported delay in their ability to access these products.  This was unexpected at the time we placed the order.  We are now exploring other options which will allow us to start the main data collection as soon as possible and have found a similar but different brand of actiwatch which is suitable and available now.  We expect to have these purchased by the end of July 2015.

The delays in sourcing actiwatch materials have in turn delayed the start of the first project that these actiwatches will be used for, Goodnight Kiwi: Kei te moe ngā tamariki? [Are the children sleeping?].  We have worked with Wellington District Public Health Nurses to recruit schools from the Wellington region, and have started to recruit children aged 7-9 and their parents from two of these schools.  We have modified our study design by recruiting high and low-decile schools concurrently.

We intend to begin data collection in August this year.  Data collection will involve monitoring children’s sleep over a week using actigraphy, parents completing a survey about the home sleep environment, demographics, and parent knowledge about sleep, and teachers completing a survey about children’s daytime functioning.  In this project, we will aim to: 1) Describe the sleep of a diverse range of children in regards to ethnicity and SES; 2) Examine how children’s sleep is associated with daytime learning and behaviour; 3) Identify family and parent factors associated with poor sleep.

We are grateful to the Wellington Medical Research Foundation for supporting our research.  This support will enable us to complete a project that will provide the first objective measures of sleep in New Zealand children from diverse communities, including children from low-SES communities, and Māori children.  We also plan to use the actiwatches in future projects in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Otago Wellington.  We expect to be able to provide a more detailed report at the end of the year.