Sleep is critical to health, wellbeing, and daily functioning. Therefore, measuring sleep, including promoters and barriers of healthy sleep is vital. However, there are few tools that allow for an in-depth assessment to capture the home sleep environment and personal routines, as well as changes to these routines, for individuals and families. Therefore, we developed a novel mixed method (qualitative and quantitative), semi-structured interview approach, which combined graphical elicitation and time use approaches to create a new measure of sleep and sleep routines.
In this paper, we outline the development of a mixed-method approach to capture individual and household level sleep routines. The key findings were: 1) Adherence, feasibility, and acceptability of the method was high, 2) Participants reported high enjoyment of the activity, and 3) the method led to increased accuracy and recall of the home sleep environment and sleep routines.
There is high utility of this method for engaging with different target groups and demographics to explore sleep management behaviours and routines used by individuals and households. This approach will help to inform the development of new survey instruments and identify new potential interventions to improve sleep health.