COPing With Shift Work
COPing With Shift Work
This study is a clinical trial in which 300 Police Officers who currently work midnight shifts in the participating police departments will be recruited to test the effectiveness of a new web-based program to address sleep and associated problems related to shift work, particularly night shift work. Recruitment letters will be sent to all officers currently working midnight shift, with the goal of recruiting 300 officers willing to participate in the study. The 300 participants will be randomly assigned to either the experimental group (receiving the web-based program) or the waitlist control group. Participants in the experimental group will be given access to the program site (COPing with Shift Work) and the mobile application (Sleep Tracker). Following completion of the field test, participants in the control condition (as well as all other interested officers) will have access to the web-based COPing with Shift Work program.
All participants will be asked to complete a baseline questionnaire containing multiple measures of sleep, dietary practices, physical activity and job performance. Participants will be asked to complete the posttest approximately three months following initial access to the intervention.
Primary and secondary outcome measures: The Primary outcome measures are "sleep quality" as measured by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and "sleepiness" as measured by the sleepiness subscale of the widely used Karolinska Sleep Questionnaire (KSQ). The investigators have adapted the sleep measures to apply to individuals who work nights and may sleep during the day.
Secondary outcome measures include the Nutritional Patterns Scale, a 13-item modification of the Block Self-Administered Diet History Questionnaire assessing the nutritional value of the respondent's diet; Attitudes Toward a Healthy Diet, a 17-item scale, based on the Health Belief Model and developed and validated by Trenkner and associates assessing perceived benefits and barriers to eating a healthy diet; the Godin Leisure-Time Exercise Questionnaire, a brief 4-item query of usual leisure-time exercise habits; and work productivity measured with the Work Limitations Questionnaire (WLQ), developed and validated by Lerner and associates.
It is expected that the program group participants will have significantly better outcomes than the control group at three months.
Inclusion Criteria:
Exclusion Criteria: