Consistent headaches and puffy eyes aren’t always caused by your sodium level being too high. Also, taking new supplements or a magic relaxation technique may not be the care you need. 

Sometimes all you need is sleep- good sleep is the cornerstone of good health, yet how many times have you checked the quality of your sleep? You could also be sleeping and not getting quality sleep, so how exactly would you know if you are getting quality sleep? 

Creating a sleep quality assessment helps you evaluate the effectiveness of your sleep and know the specific areas you need to improve to sleep better and remain healthy.

Let’s look at how to create a sleep quality assessment with Formplus.

Understanding Sleep Quality

There’s no replacement for good sleep, experts claim that lack of good sleep could increase your risk factor for late-life neurological problems like dementia and Alzheimers. Also, it’s not just sleep, it’s “good sleep”, which calls into question factors like sleep duration, sleep depth, sleep continuity, and overall sleep-wake cycle regulation.

You need quality sleep to function both mentally and physically; here is why:

• Physical Health: Sleep is important in regulating hormones, enhancing body immunity, and growing or recovering body muscles. So, if you do not sleep enough, you may feel exhausted, take more time to recover, and fall sick more often compared to well-sleepers.
• Cognitive Function: You need good sleep to learn effectively and recall what you learned.
• Emotional Health: While multiple factors can contribute to poor mental health, poor sleep quality can lead to irritability, anxiety, and depression.

Common Factors Affecting Sleep Quality

Different factors influence sleep quality, here are the most common:

• Lifestyle Factors: Poor sleep routine, consuming excessive caffeine or alcohol, and using blue light-emitting gadgets just before bedtime will interfere with your sleep. These choice habits put your body at a high level of tension which makes it hard for you to sleep.
• Medical Conditions: When living with sleep apnea, insomnia, Cushing disease, or restless leg syndrome, sleep becomes difficult even if you want to sleep. 
• Stress: High cortisol levels, caused by increased stress and anxiety, can disrupt your sleep cycle and make it difficult to relax and sleep soundly.
• Environmental Factors: Noise, light pollution, and other environmental factors could also result in poor sleep quality.

Benefits of Assessing Sleep Quality Regularly

Here’s how you can use sleep quality assessment to gain more insight into your overall health and wellbeing:

• Indicate Sleep Problems: Your sleep quality can reveal and help treat underlying sleep disorders or disturbances. For example, consistent sleep disruptions may indicate medical conditions like sleep apnea, insomnia, or Cushing disease.
• Lifestyle Changes: Knowing what affects your sleep helps you make changes to improve your sleep quality and overall well-being. For example, reducing coffee and alcohol intake, exercising more, staying off screens, and wearing blue-light-blocking glasses while using gadgets.
• Track Treatment Effectiveness: regular assessment can help monitor the effectiveness of treatment plans for people with sleep disorders.
• Enhance Overall Health: Sleeping better regulates your stress levels, keeps you in a better mood, and helps you keep up with your health. This improves your energy, mood, and cognitive function for daily activities.

What is Formplus?

Formplus is a data collection tool that allows one to create all forms of assessments, surveys, bookings, and other data collection purposes. It also has a wide library that offers customizable templates to make creating assessments, quizzes, surveys, and forms easy.

Why use Formplus for Assessments?

• Ease of use: You do not have to be experienced in form creation to create great assessments with Formplus. Quite easy to navigate and create your form, it has a simple, user-friendly interface.
• Prebuilt Template: Formplus also has a wide library of templates with varied uses for surveys, registration forms, and assessments to get you started.  This way, you only need to add questions, set scoring rules, and even change the look and feel.
• Collect Data Securely: Formplus also has an offline data collection feature that ensures respondents in locations with poor connections can still fill out the form. Once their network is back up, it automatically saves their progress and allows them to submit. The forms also use end-to-end encryption to ensure respondent data are protected.

Setting Up Your Formplus Account

Here’s your step-by-step guide to creating your account with Formplus:

Method 1

• Go to Formplus
• Click on the “Sign Up” button and follow the instructions to create your account. You can use your email or sign up with Google.
• Once you’re logged in you will see your dashboard, then click Create New Form
• Add questions using the drag-and-drop builder. You can use different formats e.g. rating scales, checkboxes, yes/no, open-ended texts, etc.
• You can also use logic jump to personalize the assessment for respondents based on the previous answers. For example, if the previous question asks them if they have been diagnosed with any medical condition that affects their sleep quality, and their answer is yes, the next question would be about the details of the diagnosis. However, if the respondent chooses no, they would move on to other questions such as lifestyle choices.
• Customize the form design by changing its color, theme, and font.
• Preview the form to ensure it looks exactly how you want it to, then save or edit it.
• Share the form with respondents via email, direct form link, social media cards, or QR code. You could also embed the form code on your website or add the link to your social media link in bio.

Method 2

• Go to assessment form templates
• Choose a form
• Sign in or create your account
• Edit the form to fit your sleep quality questions
• Customize the form by changing the color palette, and font.
• Share the form with respondents via email, direct form link, social media cards, or QR code. You could also embed the form code on your website or add the link to your social media link in bio.

Designing Your Sleep Quality Assessment

Here’s a breakdown of the most important elements for creating the sleep quality assessment:

Key Questions to Include

When creating your sleep quality assessment, you want to make sure you ask the right questions and it captures all the details you would need to help improve respondents sleep quality. Here are the major areas you should consider with sample questions:

• Sleep Duration: On average, how many hours per night do you sleep?
• Sleep Disturbances: Do you experience any of the following: snoring, sleepwalking, sleep apnea, or night terrors?
• Sleep Quality: On average, how would you rate the quality of your sleep?
• Bedtime Routine:  What is your typical bedtime routine?
• Caffeine and Alcohol: How many nights per week do you have caffeine or alcohol in the hours leading into bedtime?
• Stress and Anxiety: Do you have major stress or anxiety before bed?

Tips for Creating Effective Questions

• Be Specific: Ask clear and direct questions. Don’t ask loaded questions e.g. how often do you wake up feeling exhausted and cranky, despite sleeping for long hours? The question implies that the respondent gets long hours of sleep which may not be true.  Ask simple and clear questions that don’t confuse the respondent and allow them to answer honestly.
• Use Multiple Question Types: This includes multiple-choice, checkboxes, and open-ended questions. This ensures respondents fully express how they feel when answering questions. The various question formats help you know the when, how, and where to determine the root cause of sleep issues and prescribe the right care.
• Make it Engaging: Use visuals or images to make your form more interesting. For example, you can add images for snoring, sleepwalking, and other questions.

• Sections: Organize your questions into sections for better readability.
• Logic: Use conditional logic to show or hide questions based on previous answers. For example, you could ask follow-up questions about sleep disturbances if someone answers “yes” to a previous question.

Customizing Your Assessment

Formplus gives you a lot of control over the look and feel of your assessment. Here are some ways to customize it:

• Theme: Choose from one of our several pre-designed themes that you think fits your style.
• Branding: add your logo, colors, and fonts to give it that professional feel and look.
• Custom CSS: Advanced users with an idea of coding can use custom CSS to make more changes.
• Images: Add images to make your assessment look far more interesting.
• Videos: Embed videos to inform or instruct.
• Auto-responders: Automatically email respondents who complete your assessment.
• Notifications: Get notified when anyone fills out your form.

Testing and Publishing Your Assessment

Pilot-test your survey before you distribute it to the respondents. The last thing you need is misleading questions or complex questions that respondents will abandon, defeating the purpose of the assessment. Here are ways to do it with Formplus:

• Preview– Click the “Preview” button to see what it will look like. If you are satisfied with it, you can move to settings but if not, you can go back to edit the form and further customize it.
• Test: Fill out the form yourself to see that all works as it should.
• Share the form: After testing the form and it fits your requirements, share it with the respondents via email, direct link, social media, or QR Code. You can also embed your assessment into your website by copying and pasting the form code into a specific webpage.
• Export- If you want to analyze your assessment data further, export it as a CSV file and upload it into your analytics software.

Analyzing Sleep Quality Data

The response feature allows you to view individual responses and see a visualized report of these responses. You can also analyze this data by filtering based on questions or dates.

Formplus also has an analytics dashboard that helps you identify trends in the data collected. For example, it helps you see the type of device and browser your respondents use. It also shows your submission count, abandonment rate, and unique visits. This data can help you know if the respondents have a difficult time navigating your form and guide you in simplifying your form.

If you would like to use an advanced data analysis tool like Python or R, you can simply export your data as a CSV file. Formplus also allows you to back up your responses to Google Sheets, so you can also use that to analyze your data.

Tips for Interpreting Sleep Quality Data

• Look for Patterns: Identify trends or patterns in your data. For example, do people with a specific occupation sleep better, or what age group tends to sleep less?
• Compare to Averages: Compare your results to average sleep duration and quality. This will help you gauge if the client is sleeping enough, and if not, what you can do to improve this.
• Lifestyle Factors: Consider how lifestyle factors such as stress, diet, and exercise might affect sleep routine. For example, people working remotely from other time zones will not sleep within the same timeframe that people in their time zones sleep. This can potentially affect the sleep quality even when having the same hours of sleep.

Summary

Creating a sleep quality assessment is a simple and effective way to track habits and their impact on sleep quality. It helps you understand sleep patterns and improve overall well-being. Your assessment should cover the factors that affect sleep quality such as sleep duration, environment, lifestyle choices, etc. These factors pinpoint what causes poor sleep in respondents and help you develop unique solutions that fit their needs. 

You also need an efficient form-building tool to create assessments and see patterns in data to develop the best care plans to improve respondents’ sleep quality. Here are some templates to help you effortlessly create your sleep quality assessment.