Toward the Cross-Cultural Comparison of Multi-Dimension Structure of Individual Patterns of Sleep-Wake Behavior

Kseniya Bobrova, Kamilla Urakaeva, Olga Lopaeva and Mike Onishenko

1. Such individual abilities as productivity and emotional performances are related to sleep-wake habits. That is why the investigations of individual chronotypological differences are of a great importance for applied psychological areas, i.e. for such a purpose as professional selection on tolerance to shift and night work. In this project we are asking two main questions. How many individual traits of sleep-wake pattern might be assessed by means of chronotypological questionnaires? And To which extent there traits are universal, i.e might be found in people of different nationalities and ethnicities, have genetically determined background, based on the internal time measuring systems, etc.?
2. The chronobiological questionnaires are mostly based on unidimensional approaches to biorhythmic typology. The majority of them were designed to distinguish between morning and evening types. Therefore, they consider moningness-eveningness construct as further non-divided. Only two, but quite independent studies of psychometrical features of chronobiological questionnaires provided solid arguments against the uniscale approaches to assessment of individual traits of sleep-wake cycle. These studies - one was carried out in Siberia and another was mostly done on the Australian populations - are based one rather big samples and application of conventional psychomentric analysis for treating self-assessed chronobiological characters. The analyses of factor structure of 52-statement SWPAQ (Putilov, 1993, 2000) and 38-statement LOCI (Roberts, 1997) revealed 5 and 3 dimensions, respectively.
3. Both questionnaires point on two similar dimensions. These dimensions correspond to morning and evening scales, and seem to be rather weekly related one to another. The correspondence of the 3rd dimension of LOCI ("Propensity for sleep dept") to the dimensions of SWPAQ is not clear. Similar to the morning scales of the LOCI and SWPAQ, these statements represent the habits of sleep-wake behavior in the morning hours. Besides, most items of this dimension look similar to the statements from one of three sub-dimensions (tetrads) of the morning scale of the SWPAQ. However, several other items correspond to the statements from other SWPAQ scales. On the present step of the project we are trying to clarify the relationship between the dimensions of the SWPAQ and LOCI.
4. The LOCI was translated from English (see Appendix 1) and used together with the SWPAQ (see Appendix 2) to assess chronotypological profiles of 159 respondents, approximately 70% of them were students. Age of the respondents ranged from 15 to 56.
5. Now we plan to collect data from age- and sex-matched samples of non-Russian speakers living in other parts of the world (i.e. Australia, Germany, Sri-Lanka) and/or belonging to other than Russian ethnicity and nationality. Comparison of these samples in terms of the factor structure of the combined (90-item) questionnaire will help to clarify the status of the third dimension of the Australian questionnaire, and the number of dimensions (5 or 6) that might be assessed with the Australian and Russian questionnaires. On the next step of the project the questionnaires will be used in the cross-cultural and human genetics researches.