The Pittsburgh Sleep Diary

TLDR

The Pittsburgh Sleep Diary (PghSD) is a comprehensive instrument that records bedtime and waketime components to document sleep and waking behaviors, addressing a growing need in research and clinical practice. The study presents two‑week PghSD data from 234 subjects to demonstrate the instrument’s usefulness, validity, and reliability. Data were collected from diverse groups and compared with polysomnographic, actigraphic, personality, and circadian type measures. The PghSD reliably detected differences by weekend, age, gender, personality, and circadian type, agreed with actigraphic estimates of sleep timing and quality, and maintained correlations (0.56–0.81) over 12–31 months.

Abstract

Increasingly, there is a need in both research and clinical practice to document and quantify sleep and waking behaviors in a comprehensive manner. The Pittsburgh Sleep Diary (PghSD) is an instrument with separate components to be completed at bedtime and waketime. Bedtime components relate to the events of the day preceding the sleep, waketime components to the sleep period just completed. Two-week PghSD data is presented from 234 different subjects, comprising 96 healthy young middle-aged controls, 37 older men, 44 older women, 29 young adult controls and 28 sleep disorders patients in order to demonstrate the usefulness, validity and reliability of various measures from the instrument. Comparisons are made with polysomnographic and actigraphic sleep measures, as well as personality and circadian type questionnaires. The instrument was shown to have sensitivity in detecting differences due to weekends, age, gender, personality and circadian type, and validity in agreeing with actigraphic estimates of sleep timing and quality. Over a 12-31 month delay, PghSD measures of both sleep timing and sleep quality showed correlations between 0.56 and 0.81 (n = 39, P < 0.001).