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What’s Keeping You Awake? A campaign for sleep analysis of Bryant University students

Julia Winterhalter

Bryant University

COM480-A

Professor Volkman

May 11th, 2021

Introduction

As college students navigate busy schedules and new environments, it is easy to lose

track of the habits we grew up with, one of the most important ones being sleep. It is important

to understand how our bodies and minds are impacted by beneficial and detrimental sleeping

habits in order to adjust our behaviors to those most suitable to our personal selves. My health

campaign is being created to combat the problems with sleep loss in order to prevent college

students from falling into poor behaviors that have long term effects on their health. Throughout

my research I was able to understand underlying causes behind why college students are likely to

lose sleep and come up with the best ways to help fix them. With the help of surveys, interviews,

the Social Cognitive Theory, and my own understanding as a rising college senior, I was able to

craft the following campaign around the best interests of my target audience in order to see

effective results.

Background

Everyone’s bodies are different and are likely to experience a variety of symptoms from

sleep loss. It is recommended that young adults get about eight hours of unbothered sleep per

night. However, many people struggle to achieve those standards due to outlying factors, and for

college students, this may include a noisy environment or extensive physical activity throughout

the day. A lack of sleep can affect the academic performance and social lives of students, as well,

as found in a study by Cifre (2020). College students with poor sleeping schedules reflect

symptoms of insomnia, frequent awakenings, and difficulty falling asleep (Cifre, 2020). This

may be due to academic stress or adjusting to different routines during the school year, which

can be difficult for young adults that recently moved away from home. There are two core stages

of sleeping required for a person to be well rested, rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep and slow-
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wave sleep (SWS). These alternate throughout the night and vary per person depending on

sleeping conditions but are equally as important to experience each (Rasch & Born, 2013).

Having trouble with sleep can directly impact these stages and lead to long-term effects such as

psychological disorders like memory loss. For college students, this is an early stage to be

experiencing these side effects and they can greatly influence their health and performance in

daily tasks. A study done by Javaheri et al. (2017) defined another sleep problem as sleep apnea,

which is the absence of inspiratory airflow for at least ten seconds. It may affect people

differently depending on their sleep patterns and daily activity, but ultimately results from issues

in the airway muscles. For college students ages 18-22, this may cause side effects that impact

their body and mental health (Cifre, 2020). Recognizing these issues is important in order to

prevent them before the side effects become permanent.

As the age of technology continues to advance, social media becomes more and more

prominent in our everyday lives. Therefore, it is leading younger generations to lose more sleep

due to excessive amounts of screen time (van der Schuur, 2019). Studies believe that the time

adolescents spend on smartphones is time that is meant for sleep, such as late at night or first

thing in the morning. By directly displacing time for sleep, social media has taken over our

physical motivation to get out of bed on time in the mornings and being able to fully relax before

going to bed at night (Cain & Gradisar, 2010). As college students adjust to new sleeping

schedules, it is easy to get lost in their free time and lose track of habits that worked well for

them at home. Spending time late at night on social media also exposes people to blue light,

which disrupts our melatonin, a hormone that helps us control our sleep cycle (van der Schuur,

2019). In a society that is currently heavily focused on social media use, it is increasingly more

common that people lose sleep over it and suffer the side effects. College students that are
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substituting hours of sleep for hours of screen time are also exposing themselves to risks of

memory loss. A study by Rasch and Born (2013) states that memory enables us to “adapt

behaviors to the demands of an ever-changing environment”, but without proper sleep, we lose

pieces of sleep stages that are crucial to memory consolidation. Memory functions to encode,

consolidate, and retrieve messages, so losing sleep that helps to reinforce this behavior is

detrimental to these functions (Rasch & Born, 2013). In research done by Scullin (2013), a study

between young adults and healthy older adults was conducted to test word retention before and

after sleeping or not sleeping. The results of the study found that younger adults had greater

retention levels than older adults did, showing that the link between sleep and memory weakens

with age (Scullin, 2013). This reflects how important it is to teach young adults good sleeping

habits early on, so they do not hurt their memory and health in the long-term.

Alongside memory, sleep complaints can also lead to symptoms of depression and

anxiety (Koffel & Watson, 2009). People have self-reported their depression as coinciding with

oversleeping, feelings of fatigue during the day, and difficulties falling asleep at night. Similarly,

anxiety disorders have been associated with insomnia and fatigue (Koffel & Watson, 2009). This

study found that sleep complaints are correlated with aging and mental illness, so being able to

tackle them at the early stages is crucial to preventing these long-term effects. In creating the

following health campaign, all these factors were taken into consideration in order to fully

understand the importance of sleep loss on college students. There needs to be proper outlets to

help control screen time use, find activities besides technology use to fill our time, and allow for

a more restful night’s sleep. This will further prevent symptoms of anxiety and depression as a

result of sleep loss, and students on college campuses can feel better about their social, academic,

and physical well-being.

In order to move into developing my topic further and fully understanding the target

audience of my campaign, I decided to base my ideas around the Social Cognitive Theory. This

particular theory was studied because I wanted to focus on how our behaviors are modeled after

others. Luszczynska and Schwarzer (2005) define a part of this theory as “individuals generate

new behavior patterns in a similar way by going beyond what they have seen or heard,” therefore

making people more inclined to adjust their habits based off the ones they observe from others.

Utilizing this theory and my knowledge of the behaviors of college students made conducting

studies and interviews easier and led me to create a campaign that would have beneficial impacts

on its intended audience.

Audience Analyses

The next step in understanding where this campaign would be taken would be to know

the needs of the targeted audience. For this campaign, my target audience is Bryant University

students ages 18-22. As a class and individually, conducting audience analyses was incredibly

helpful to the development of my ideas and the campaign format that I would decide on. Asking

questions related to my campaign topic and demographics of the audience allowed me to craft

my ideas around real problems and potential solutions that would benefit college students. Our

first audience analysis, the Qualtrics questionnaire created by the class, was helpful in gaining

insight into the Bryant population’s demographics and basic responses to questions related to

sleep and mental health. Out of the 114 responses, the most common ways students dealt with

sleep related problems are relaxing before bedtime (18.32%), keeping their bedroom dark, quiet,

and cool (14.87%), and exercising and maintaining a healthy diet (14.44%). This is important to

developing my campaign because it shows the focus areas that my audience will be most

receptive to and the habits they are most willing to continue or adjust. A particular response I
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found intriguing for future research was that only 3.88% of respondents stated they remove

electronics from their sleeping space as a way to manage sleep. As I found throughout my

research, electronics and smartphone are some of the leading causes of sleep loss because of how

we displace time for sleep with social media (van der Schuur, 2019). Although these students

recognized that they have problems with falling asleep, only 43.86% of the participants

responded that addressing sleep problems for college students is “extremely important”. This

interested me to fully understand why students may think addressing problems is important but

may not want to make the changes to their own personal routine.

As I continued to also focus on sleep related to memory throughout my research, part of

our class audience analysis focused on participants responding if they have trouble with memory

loss. 30.70% of participants, roughly one-third, states that they “somewhat frequently” have

difficulty focusing and/or remembering things during the day. This strengthened my concern and

interest to learn about the impacts sleep loss has on memory retention. Our memory enables us to

adapt our behaviors to our changing environments, so the consolidation of memory is crucial to

developing those behaviors and important to our mental health (Rasch & Born, 2013). Targeting

a campaign at college students by emphasizing this negative side effect would be very beneficial

as to stop the issue before it becomes long-term.

Our second audience analysis, which I conducted two interviews for, was able to provide

more in depth knowledge on specific lifestyles of Bryant students so that I could understand

personal motives and ask follow up questions. Both of my respondents surprised me with their

answers because they actually manage to get a good amount of sleep throughout the week while

maintaining very busy schedules. Sleeping patterns were consistent for most nights, with usual

disruptions of noise, stress, and caffeine intake. My research found that social media
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personalities and family are the most influential people when it comes to changing our habits,

which further developed my understanding and support of the Social Cognitive Theory.

Respondents stated that they are only likely to model behavior after someone who is experienced

or trustworthy because the information being shared would appear to them as more credible. By

modeling strong behaviors of others, we can increase our ability to manage the situations we are

in. This helped me come to conclusions about the gains and losses of individual sleeping

behaviors and the disruptions that can impact the rest of our day. Creating a health campaign that

can particularly emphasize the gains of good sleep will be very beneficial to college students as

they continue to adapt to lifestyle changes.

Initial Campaign Idea

Building a campaign idea off of the information I learned from research and audience

analyses was relatively easy because of the insights I gained. I knew that this campaign had to be

interactive with students in order for them to fully grasp the objective of the campaign, otherwise

it would just be looked over. This objective that I want to achieve is getting college students to

control their sleeping habits and create a schedule that works best alongside their academic and

social lives. This would especially be done with the help and limit of social media and screen

time. However, I know as a college student myself that changing the way you use social media is

very difficult without the proper motives. My campaign is designed to emphasize what those

motives can be and how they can be manageable.

The campaign initiates as an online flyer to raise awareness about the sleep issues college

students face and shares resources that begin to educate them (see Appendix A). The goal of this

is to spark interest in wanting the change, and the flyer would be shared on social media, such as
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through Instagram stories or on the Bryant app, because they are frequently checked and updated

throughout the day. The flyer will share information from my research process, such as

information about sleep patterns, the biggest influencers of sleep loss, and some of the long term

effects of sleep complaints. Students that then recognize they have a problem with their sleeping

habits can share and save the flyer, with the next step being to attend an in person meeting. At

these meetings, ideally held multiple times throughout a semester (see Appendix B), students can

share with one another the habits they have found work or do not work for their schedules,

modeling after one another and reinforcing the Social Cognitive Theory behaviors that I learned

throughout my research. The goal of this part of the campaign is to implement behaviors that can

be repeated and eventually incorporated into a student’s daily nighttime routine. As found in the

survey, college students are most comfortable talking to physicians/therapists about their mental

health issues, and since those are not always accessible to young adults, this campaign will aim

to provide another resource instead. By holding these meetings multiple times throughout the

semester, it also reinforces the idea of a routine and pattern that I hope to implement into

students’ lives.

Campaign Feedback

When it was time to share the kind of campaign I wanted to create for Bryant students, I

had a lot of great initial information to build off of. However, pitching the idea to others would

help me further develop my ideas and make adjustments that I would not have made on my own.

Inviting Bryant faculty to our class to share our ideas and gain feedback was incredibly helpful in

the process and caused me to dive deeper into my ideas to make sure my campaign would be the

most effective version of itself if it were to be implemented. I shared my ideas and my reasoning

behind why I decided to take the campaign route I did, which led to a collaborative discussion
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about where else I could go with it. The most common feedback I received was about engaging

my audience enough to attend the in person sessions and potentially creating an incentive for it.

These incentives included providing goodies for people that attend, like free food or t-shirts, or

having it being hosted by someone familiar to the targeted audience. This ranged from getting a

famous guest speaker that college students are fans of, or even having your RA host the event to

make it more open and informal. As I learned from my own observations and the feedback from

our guests, it is easy to share a campaign, but difficult to get people to follow through. The

Bryant faculty was able to provide this feedback based off what they knew had been the most

successful in the past from their own initiatives for student programs. Building off of that idea,

Professor Hokeness gave a suggestion to appeal to more students by pairing with another student

organization on campus, such as Greek life, student government, or the gateway program. These

partnerships would connect the benefits of my campaign to other aspects of life, for example,

how good sleeping habits can make you feel more energized throughout the day and form

routines alongside your academic and social life. Utilizing these partnerships would also help me

to understand what went right or wrong in the past programs they had hosted that would benefit

mine starting off on a better foot.

This feedback process taught me a lot about what makes a campaign work effectively and

allowed me to take real experiences from Bryant faculty to understand how they have achieved

similar goals with a similar target audience. It is important to keep people engaged and excited

about a campaign rather than posting information and losing interest too soon. Although students

may be aware of their sleeping problems, they are not always motivated enough to try and fix

them. My goal is to appeal to that motivation and incentivize Bryant students to follow through

with their needs in order to see a strong change in their sleeping habits.
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Implementation and Evaluation

Piecing together all parts of the campaign process to create one strong and effective end

result has been very interesting and informative. I learned about the topic of choice, sleep, and

first-hand how Bryant students deal with sleep problems and side effects. Being able to

understand my audience, and even being part of the target demographic myself, allowed me to

alter my campaign to best fit the needs of them. Students must be getting the proper amount of

sleep and under the best fit conditions, but it is too often that these are problems are not being

addressed. It is my overall objective to fix these sleep issues in a collaborative and long-term

way. In the final stages of this campaign process and implementing my ideas into something

functional, I took everything that I learned and created a rough draft of what the flyer would look

like (see Appendix A). I also created a Gantt Chart to plan out how my campaign would function

throughout an academic year, September to May (see Appendix B). Marketing will take place

multiple times throughout the semester in order to send reminders and keep people informed.

Recruiting participants and planning sessions will take place within the first month of the year to

allow the campaign team to prepare everything in advanced, and the preparation of material and

venues occurring at the beginning of each semester to ensure all campaign aspects are in order.

The course sessions will be administered every other month for consistency, but to not

overwhelm the schedules of students, and evaluations will be conducted the last month of each

semester, December and May.

In order to reach my target audience, I will pair with Bryant’s student government and

post the flyer online to Instagram, as well as have students within the organization share to their

accounts. I chose our student government to partner with because they are likely to have a wide

range of respectable students in each grade and many connections to other organizations and
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Bryant faculty. As I found throughout research, source credibility is very important to people that

are looking for information or trying to change their behaviors. If people know that a source

lacks credibility, they are more likely to disregard the information they are presented with (Pena

et al., 2017). The concept of social contagion also was expressed throughout my research and

audience observations, meaning people will change their beliefs and memories about ideas if the

speaker has expertise and trustworthiness (Koppel et al., 2014). I believe that the student

government is a credible source for information sharing and is well-respected within the Bryant

community, therefore making students more apt to listening and trusting their opinions as part of

this campaign. If the source of my campaign objectives were someone less credible, the presence

of social contagion within my target audience would be less apparent (Koppel et al., 2014). The

people involved will need to be dedicated to following through with the campaign, but the time

commitment overall will not be too high besides the in person sessions that are held throughout

the semester and evaluation periods to reflect on them. This is so that the people involved, both

on the organization’s and participant side, will not be overwhelmed with the campaign and

remain feeling comfortable being involved throughout the semester. My in person sessions will

also be partnered with the student government in order to aim for a higher attendance number

and collaborate on ideas throughout the session, and then reflecting on what went well and what

could improve for the next one. I will be able to measure success through the evaluation sessions

and by keeping track of the number and frequency of attendants at the sessions throughout each

semester. Reviewing these parts of the campaign alongside the members of student government

will allow us to determine where our ideas need to be improved in order for future sessions and

initiatives to run more effectively.

Conclusion
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The overall objective of this campaign is to educate Bryant students on the negative side

effects of poor sleeping behaviors and providing a consistent resource of help to reinforce the

good behaviors. This became my objective as I realized the campaign could not be purely

statistical but needed to have a personal and interactive aspect in order for my target audience to

fully take something away from it. My research provided insightful knowledge on the sleeping

habits of college students, the reasons behind lack of sleep, the negative long term effects, and

most important, how we can start to fix them. Incorporating strong sleep patterns and behaviors

into our daily lives as college students will lead to better academic performance and social

livelihood, two areas very important to the development of an individual.

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References

Cain, N., & Gradisar, M. (2010). Electronic media use and sleep in school-aged children and

adolescents: A review. Sleep medicine, 11(8), 735–742.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleep.2010.02.006

Cifre, A.B., Walters, K. S., & Budnick, C. J. (2020). College student sleep and executive

functioning: An examination of potential moderators. Translational Issues in

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org.bryant.idm.oclc.org/10.1037/tps0000258

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Koffel, E., & Watson, D. (2009). The two-factor structure of sleep complaints and its relation to

depression and anxiety. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 118(1), 183-194. https://doi-

org.bryant.idm.oclc.org/10.1037/a0013945

Koppel, J., Wohl, D., Meksin, R., & Hirst, W. (2014). The effect of listening to others remember

on subsequent memory: The roles of expertise and trust in socially shared retrieval-

induced forgetting and social contagion. Social Cognition, 32, 148–180.

10.1521/soco.2014.32.2.148

Luszczynska, A., & Schwarzer, R. (2005). Social cognitive theory. Predicting health

behaviour, 2, 127-169.
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Pena, M. M., Klemfuss, J. Z., Loftus, E. F., & Mindthoff, A. (2017). The effects of exposure to

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monitoring and memory accuracy. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and

Practice, 4(4), 337–347. https://doi-org.bryant.idm.oclc.org/10.1037/cns0000137

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Scullin, M. K. (2013). Sleep, memory, and aging: The link between slow-wave sleep and

episodic memory changes from younger to older adults. Psychology and Aging, 28(1),

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van der Schuur, W.A., Baumgartner, S. E., & Sumter, S. R. (2019). Social Media Use, Social

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Appendix A

Prototype of digital health campaign flyer

Appendix B

Gantt Chart for timeline of campaign events

SEPT OCT NOV DEC JAN FEB MAR APR MAY