During young adulthood, individuals face increasing pressure to achieve academic success while navigating extensive exposure to the digital world, irregular sleep-wake patterns, and the onset of work-related stressors. Against this backdrop, anxiety symptoms often co-occur with sleep problems. Symptoms associated with insomnia, including prolonged time taken to fall asleep, as well as psychological distress, may function in support of one another through various mechanisms. In particular, they involve cognitive arousal, emotional regulation difficulties, and impairment of sleep continuity. The goal of this manuscript is to detail a publication-ready protocol and analysis plan for a quantitative cross-sectional research study on the impact of anxiety symptoms on insomnia risk, sleep latency, sleep disorder severity and psychological distress among young adults aged 18-30 years. The study’s investigators plan to recruit a sample of 300 young adults through convenience sampling or purposive sampling from college, university, outpatient and community populations. The researchers will use the Generalised Anxiety Disorder Scale-7 to measure the anxiety symptoms; the Insomnia Severity Index to measure the severity of insomnia; the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index to measure the quality and sleep latency; the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale or DASS-21 to measure psychological distress. The analysis plan that will be utilized includes descriptive statistics, reliability testing, normality testing, correlation analysis, t-test, ANOVA, chi-square analysis, multiple linear regression, binary logistic regression and, if necessary, mediation modelling. No empirical dataset was provided, and therefore there are no results to report or infer. Rather than publishing a cumbersome model, this paper provides transparent model tables, figure templates, and reporting instructions to help in analysing real data collected. The GAD-7 and ISI scores should yield analytical outputs about how strongly they are associated. The contributions of anxiety to sleep latency (time it takes to fall asleep) and insomnia risk factors will be examined and predicted. Moreover, the incremental role (contribution) of psychological distress after adjustment for physical and lifestyle characteristics will be predicted. To summarize: The proposed study provides a rigorous framework for assessing anxiety-related sleep vulnerability in young adults and can help support early screening, counselling, sleep hygiene interventions and preventive mental-health services in educational and community health settings.
Shashi et al. (Mon,) studied this question.