An investigation of students' sleep quality with mediating role of metacognitions

Background and purpose: Insomnia or poor sleep quality can result in some irreparable consequences such as distraction, the absence of class, poor academic performance and eventually harming the students' physical or mental health. Therefore, this study was performed with the main aim of investigating the students' sleep quality, considering the mediating role of metacognitions. Method: The study design was descriptive of correctional type. All the students of Mohaghegh Ardabili University constituted the statistical population. The study sample was included 230 male and female students whom were picked out based on Krejcie and Morgan sample size table (1970), using the random cluster sampling method. Sleep quality index and metacognition questionnaire were used for data collection and Spearman's correlation coefficient and multivariate linear regression for the exploring of relationships between the variables. Results: The results revealed that more than 58% of the students had poor sleep quality scores. The results also indicated that the correlation coefficients of age, gender, education, metacognition total score and some subscales of metacognition with the students' sleep quality problems were significant. Meanwhile, the academic level could predict the students' sleep quality negatively (p<0.05, β=-0.214), and smoking (p<0.05, β=0.132) and negative beliefs toward the danger of thoughts (p<0.01, β=0.244) did it positively. Conclusion: It appears that the metacognitive beliefs could affect students' sleep quality through limiting a persons' ability in choosing and performing cognitive strategies on the individual experience of negatively perceived signals.