Quality sleep for everyone has proven mental, physical, and emotional health benefits. Common sleep disorders, inattention to achieving adequate sleep, and other wide-ranging reasons for poor sleep hygiene often lead to adverse health outcomes, interpersonal maladjustment, and decreases in work productivity and academic performance. There are a variety of sleep disorder screening tools, and among them is the Sleep Disorders Symptoms Checklist-25 developed by Jungquist and colleagues. It was designed to be a quick screening instrument for sleep disorders across an adult U.S. population. There is a lack of self-report tools that can screen a more limited college-age sample quickly and conveniently for common sleep disturbance and disorders. Therefore, this study examined the self-administered SDS-CL-25 to determine whether it is a reliable and valid tool for use with a U.S. college sample. The convenience type sample consisted of 312 traditional college students from a small U.S. liberal arts college in the Northeast with 76 students participating in the validation process. The internal consistency of the SDS-CL-25 was high while the test-retest intraclass correlations were between 0.678 and 0.939. The principal component analysis revealed seven components with factor loadings falling between 0.439 and 0.917. Using a discriminant function analysis, the SDS-CL-25 was able to correctly classify 84.2% of the original groups with a specificity of 81.8% and a sensitivity of 85.2%. These results indicate that the SDS-CL-25 is a reliable instrument for the sample measured in this study. It is recommended that a more statistically robust college sample of participants with more sleep disorder diagnoses is needed to confirm the instrument’s validity. Within the limitation of this study, such as small sample size, low number of participants with sleep disorders, and anomalies, the validity of the SDS-CL-25 was not established.
