COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEMORY STRENGTH, DEMOGRAPHIC VARIABLES AND SLEEP TIMING AMONG NORMAL ADULT PEOPLE: A CASE-CONTROL STUDY IN IRBID GOVERNORATE / JORDAN

Most of researches studied the effects of sleep deprivation or sleep disorders. Others studied the mechanism of sleeping function. In this study, the participants were normal adult people who had different time of sleeping; so the main objective of this study was studying the effect of sleep timing on memory strength. Whereas the specific objectives were assessment of the strength of memory of participants, comparing the memory scores between those who sleep at daytime and those who sleep at night, and comparison of memory strength among the two groups according to demographic variables. It was found that majority of cases sleep after the Dawn while majority of controls sleep after midnight. Also, the average scores of each of all ten questions of the cases were lower than of the controls . Moreover, the average of total scores of all questions of memory test among the cases were lower than among the controls. However, the differences were not significant. But when the scores categorized into low, medium and high, the differences became significant at alpha level 5%. Lastly, it was concluded that there is not significant association between time sleeping and high memory strength; but there is significant association between time of sleeping and low memory strength. Furthermore, there is no effect of level of education and income on memory strength; sex and marital status has effect on memory of night people (i.e. cases); while age group has effect on memory of control group.