Assessing the contribution of the Index of Nighttime Offline Distress: an investigation of social media's impact on adolescent sleep quality
Adolescence is characterized by substantial biological, emotional, and, importantly, social change. This has led to interest into the links between adolescent social media use and sleep, which is crucial during this developmental phase. In much research, however, the measures used are inadequate at properly quantifying adolescents’ unique relationship to social media. The Index of Nighttime Offline Distress (iNOD), conversely, is a new self-reporting questionnaire that captures why adolescents feel difficulty trying to engage from social media at night. Scottish adolescents (N>3000) took an online survey that included the iNOD, as well as other measures of social media use that we argue fail to capture its unique affordances. To assess if the iNOD is an effective and relevant measure of social media use, various regression models of the different measures were built and compared. After analysis of goodness-of-fit and predictor dominance, we concluded that inclusion of the iNOD does explain more variance in sleep quality when compared to the other measures on their own. A brief introductory analysis into the effect of age was also conducted, finding that adolescents of various ages use social media for different purposes. We hope that our findings help show that the context of adolescent social media use is important and that there is evident diversity across the population. To best understand adolescent social media use and its impact on sleep, future research and policy should approach this relationship from a holistic, multifaceted direction, rather than viewing social media as solely a quantifiable techno-centric activity.