Authors: Nino Tkemaladze, Elene Kapanadze, Nino Jatchvadze

How much sleep do students sacrifice?

Introduction
In recent times, sleep deprivation has become a really common and major issue for lots of
students. Time is tight and students have to take into consideration many factors affecting their
distribution of several activities during the day including hours of sleep, studying, working, leisure,
transportation, physical activities, etc. They face different trade-offs, such as going to bed early or
devoting more time to studying, entertaining with friends or preparing for exams, sacrificing morning
sleeping hours or missing important lectures, taking some time for afternoon naps or going to the gym,
getting extra harmful caffeine or having less energy and motivation. We investigated exactly these
behaviors of students and calculated the impact of these decisions on sleep schedule.
The main purpose of this introduced econometrics model is to find out the relationship between
students’ sleep and other variables. We conducted the survey to observe the impact of GPA, transport,
work, smoking, coffee, and workout on sleep. The main objectives of our survey were ISET students,
hence the results might be a little bit specific and diverse compared to the inference drawn from the total
student population.
Many sociologists, psychologists, and statisticians have performed numerous important pieces of
research concerning this significant issue. In 2017 researchers from the Uludag university faculty of
health sciences gave insight into the immense impact of these variables upon sleep. They mentioned that
poor sleeping habits are not only affected by academic performance but also by behavioral and emotional
issues, caffeine consumption, smoking, a healthy lifestyle, etc.

Methodology
For estimating the relationship between the above-mentioned variables, we used a multiple linear
regression model and the OLS method. We chose this model because it is more amenable to ceteris
paribus analysis, interpretation is also easier, and it helps us capture the link between dependent and
independent variables more precisely. For explanatory variables, we chose GPA, hours spent on
transportation daily, weekly working hours, daily coffee consumption in cups, and two dummy variables
including, work-out and smoking. We assigned 1 to people who work out, and 0 otherwise. We chose
another binary dummy variable for smokers, 1 corresponding to a smoker and 0 to a non-smoker.
Respectively, the final model looks like this:
sleep=β 0 + β 1 GPA + β 2 transport + β 3 work + β 4 coffee+δ 1 workout +δ 2 smoker +u
From the whole ISET student population, we collected information about 141 samples and
analyzed our data. In total, we have 6 explanatory variables and hence degrees of freedom is 141-6-
1=134.
We also omitted some variables which were intended to be in the model, for instance, screen time
and there were questions about it in the survey, as well. The problem here was about the results, for
example, students gave answers such as “infinity” or “I don’t know” for which interpretation is
impossible of course.
There are also some limitations that we could not evaluate, such as health issues, leisure time
spent on hobbies, or entertaining with friends. While considering these particular variables we faced a
 Authors: Nino Tkemaladze, Elene Kapanadze, Nino Jatchvadze

bias-variance trade-off. The model might have become complicated and the correlation between these
variables might have become high, resulting in multicollinearity, hard interpretation, poor and over-
complex model. Also, it was difficult to come up with a proper unit of measurement for describing such
variables.
Concerning descriptive statistics, as it is depicted in the pie chart, smokers’ distribution is quite
uneven, among 141 students only 14% are smokers, and it had inevitably affected our final model and
results. Regarding the workout chart, even though it is not perfectly equally distributed, the difference
between the two categories is still smaller compared to the smoker’s case. Which of course results in
different consequences regarding the model. Talking about GPA, its distribution looks quite well, since
65 students, which is almost half of the observations, have GPA more than 3.55. With respect to sleep, we
can say it is approximately normally distributed, with the mean being 7,5 hours, meaning that on average
students sleep 7-8 hours a day.

Work-out distribution

No
55, Yes
39%
86,
61%

Smokers' distribution

20, No
14%
Yes

121,
86%
 Authors: Nino Tkemaladze, Elene Kapanadze, Nino Jatchvadze

Results
We ran a regression and got following results:

We got two very insignificant variables, transport and smoke with p-values of 0.92 and 0.96,
indicating that they have technically zero effect. Meaning, the null hypothesis that their coefficients are
zeros can’t be rejected at even high alpha. This can be due to the fact that the average transportation time
for each individual is almost the same. However, the transport effect is positive, 1 hour increase in
transportation increases average sleeping hours by 16.56 seconds. Talking about smokers, since only 14%
of our sample are consuming cigarettes, it had a very low, even negligible impact. But it is notable that
smoking has a negative influence on sleep. Keeping other things constant, a smoker sleeps approximately
1,08 minutes less than a non-smoker.
Another insignificant variable is work, with a p-value of 11%. Compared to previous variables,
even though it is insignificant it can be rejected at a 20% significance level, meaning that its impact is
more important. If a student works one more hour per week, they will have to sacrifice 46.8 seconds of
sleep.
Regarding significant variables, we got three of them: GPA, coffee, and workout. First, let’s
discuss GPA. If a student wants to increase their GPA by 1 unit, they will have to give up 27 minutes of
sleep. It is logical that a person with high academic ambitions would stay up late studying and devote less
time to sleep. However, many pieces of research suggest opposite results in the long run. For example,
research by Katrina Schwartz states that sacrificing sleep for high academic performance can be harmful
in the future because the brain operates poorly, and students lose concentration. But in reality, considering
this is difficult and in the short-term, we are obliged to sleep less. Our regression states the same.
Furthermore, workout has a positive and actually the biggest impact on sleep. Our calculations
demonstrated that students who work out, sleep 29.22 minutes more than those who do not. The article by
Danielle Pacheco shows that people exercising less struggle with poor sleep quality. This can be
explained by the fact, that doing physical activities tire individuals and improves their health conditions.
Therefore, sleeping hours are affected positively.
 Authors: Nino Tkemaladze, Elene Kapanadze, Nino Jatchvadze

Another significant variable that we examined is coffee consumption. The model depicts that
drinking 1 more cup of coffee in a day decreases sleep approximately by 19.44 minutes. This observation
is strengthened by many articles, one of which is written by Christopher Drake. He declares that
consuming caffeine remarkably disrupts sleep. What’s more, if this action is continuous for multiple
nights, deterioration of daytime functioning will be present.
Even though in the regression there are some insignificant variables, joint F statistics is still quite
high (4.23) indicating that together these variables perform well. In addition, R-squared is low,
approximately 0.159, which means that a small part of the dependent variable is explained by our sample
regression model. This corresponds to the fact that there exist other factors affecting sleep for students,
which we were not able to capture, such as health conditions, afternoon naps, time spent on entertaining,
and other unobserved factors.

Conclusion
In conclusion, we can deduce that some of these variables might not affect sleep individually, but
jointly they have an important impact. Even though the model may have some flaws, it can successfully
be used to analyze and explain sleep variation and its causes for students. We used both categorical and
numerical data and calculated their effects as depicted in the regression. With our model, it is possible to
estimate an individual’s sleeping hours. For example, using distribution charts we evaluated that an
average student sleeps approximately 6.73 hours a day. Which is quite low, and it indicates severe sleep
problems among students. According to research, people who sleep less than 7 or 8 hours have serious
problems in the future. Because of this, students must aim to balance their priorities by thinking more
about sleep and less about other things. It is important to find the golden mean.

Bibliography
 Authors: Nino Tkemaladze, Elene Kapanadze, Nino Jatchvadze

https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.3170. (n.d.).

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/26079/why-sleeping-may-be-more-important-than-studying. (n.d.).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6286721/?fbclid=IwAR1zc0P12B5XvHl7u-
CQOO4rMO2dpTpkVvv7OdQgEG4ZpG1asPArl37OLlc#:~:text=Additionally%20it%20is
%20recorded%20in, 4. (n.d.).

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/physical-activity/exercise-and-sleep. (n.d.).