[HN Gopher] The impact of school shutdown on sleep in adolescent...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The impact of school shutdown on sleep in adolescents: a natural
       experiment
        
       Author : luu
       Score  : 48 points
       Date   : 2020-11-06 07:41 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.sciencedirect.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedirect.com)
        
       | CameronNemo wrote:
       | Little bit of a tangent, but I have adopted a novel alarm clock
       | application called "Suntimes Alarms". This alarm clock is
       | programmed according to an offset of solar events (for me the
       | sunrise, but if you want something for noon or sunset that is
       | possible). This recent DST was the smoothest transition in many
       | years. Particularly because I was not beholden to a stringent
       | work schedule. I was free to set my hours a bit more flexibly.
        
       | Drdrdrq wrote:
       | N=45. Interesting idea though.
        
         | clircle wrote:
         | N=45 is relatively high power for simple analyses, like a
         | t-test (not sure if that's what the paper did).
         | 
         | You can detect an effect size of 0.6 with 80% power when N is
         | 45. You can also detect a effect of 0.7 with 90% power at N=45.
         | 
         | There are other things that can make results unreliable, like
         | p-hacking, but a sample size of 45 is not a sufficient
         | condition for bad science.
        
       | rossdavidh wrote:
       | So, I agree it's an interesting idea, and I think this small
       | study could hopefully spur more conclusive ones, but...
       | 
       | 1) N=45
       | 
       | 2) based on "semi-structured phone interview"
       | 
       | Neither of these is a deal-breaker, but what you'd really prefer
       | is some sort of objective measure of sleep quantity, and how it
       | impacted the person. Teenagers are, by and large, entirely aware
       | that when adults ask them questions, they are likely to draw
       | conclusions about policy towards teenagers. They want to sleep
       | later. How likely is it that they would admit it, if they didn't
       | really get any more sleep out of this?
       | 
       | Not saying it's not true, or that it isn't an interesting idea to
       | try to put this "natural experiment" to work somehow, but I'm not
       | sure this is really enough to draw any conclusions, and I
       | actually already agreed with their conclusion before seeing this
       | study.
       | 
       | A better method might be to compare home-school students to
       | public schools, or compare summer-break to school year, and to
       | use some more objective metric than a phone interview.
        
       | toyg wrote:
       | I wonder if the youthful predilection for "sleep late, be active
       | at dawn" is some sort of evolutionary adaptation. Night raids,
       | the young being tasked with the most annoying night-shifts...
       | 
       | All pure speculation, but there must be something more than "kids
       | are lazy and then they 'grow' out of it" - if anything because
       | some people ( _cough cough_ ) never actually do.
        
       | mavhc wrote:
       | AIUI teenagers in USA start school early so they can reuse the
       | same school buses for younger children, it's a cost cutting
       | measure most of all
        
         | pxeboot wrote:
         | That is unrelated to the school schedule. Most bus drivers
         | aren't going to care if their routes start at 6, 7 and 8am or
         | 8, 9 and 10am.
        
         | rossdavidh wrote:
         | There is also an issue of avoiding the 5pm rush hour when
         | heading home.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2020-11-07 23:01 UTC)