Hey everyone! Sorry I took so long to do this write up. I've been quite busy with stuff after my semester ended and this fell on the back burner. But for those who are interested - better late than never - here we go!
My thesis was received quite well, and the grade it was given was the lynch pin in my efforts to qualify for masters level postgraduate study. I have since been applying and interviewing at places from all over the country, and found out the other day that I got in to my local university! So THANK YOU guys. Your support was a factor in the success of this thesis.
So, here is my attempt at conveying how the thesis went. I hope it makes sense, let me know if it doesn't! I'm leaving for Christmas vacation in a couple days and wrote this up quickly because I'm busy getting ready to leave. I just wanted to let you guys know.
Despite appearances, this write up is actually very brief, it’s possible that my explanation may leave questions unanswered. If that’s the case, please ask and I’ll do my best to answer them. You may want to refresh yourself on the top by reading my OP, however, I will do my best to summarise what the concept of my thesis was here:
Background
The project that I worked on was about the possible psycho-social influences that may affect peoples’ quality of sleep, which may ultimately impact on their health and well-being. The main influences that I investigated were the satisfaction of close relationships and adult attachment styles.
Attachment theory involves ‘attachment styles’ that are psychological processes that involve emotional bonds with an attachment figure (such as a parent) that may help shape personality and social development through infancy into adulthood. For adults, it is said that attachment styles may impact upon peoples close personal relationships, especially as people branch out and obtain new “attachment figures”, such as close friends or romantic partners. Attachment has also been shown to influence other aspects of people’s lives, such as health promoting or health risking behaviour, and of course, sleep.
As you grow up, you develop your own sort of ‘attachment style’ which is a part of your personality and how you may deal with relationships with attachment figures.
They are currently considered to come in 3 styles, which range from low-high on a continuum. ‘Avoidant attachment’ regards the fear of commitment, ‘Anxious’ attachment is a fear of abandonment. These are considered to be ‘insecure’ attachment styles. Finally, there’s ‘secure’ attachment, which is characterised by very low levels of avoidant and anxious attachment. This means you may be easy going when it comes to relationships.
We also wanted to see if these attachment styles may INDIRECTLY influence sleep quality THROUGH relationship satisfaction. In doing so, we wanted to examine whether happy relationships may offset any potential negative impact that insecure attachment styles may have on how we sleep.
This is a very lightly researched area, so the project was novel in several aspects, which is pretty neat.
A bit about the study itself:
We ended up with 511 valid participants (wow) from all over the place, which I was told broke a department record and was about as reflective of the general population as someone in my situation was going to get.
Because we had so many people, we decided to conduct further exploratory analyses based on the reported relationship status of participants. We ended up with 3 groups large enough to study. Those are: Those in committed or defacto relationships, those who are married, and those who are single.
To see if attachment styles indirectly influenced sleep, we used a mediation analysis for anyone who is familiar with this method. However, the way mediation works is that for results to occur, you need to run 3 separate analyses which all require significant results. Such as, ‘insecure attachment contributes directly to impaired sleep’. If that doesn’t happen, you don’t get cool results. I mention this because we used a new method of mediation designed by a prominent expert in mediation, which does not need prerequisite results to occur. Instead of depending on 3 separate tests, the analysis simply tests an ‘indirect effect’ and tells you whether or not mediation occurs.
Here’s what was found:
In the analysis of the overall sample, we found that, the higher someone’s level of avoidant attachment, the worse you sleep. However, anxious attachment did not appear to impact sleep. This actually fits in with the only general population study that exists, which is interesting. I’m not going to go into great detail into the discussion because there’s a lot to talk about, but in short, it’s possible that the concerns that bother people who are attachment avoidant during the day may persist into sleep and contribute to sleep dysfunction. Next, both attachment styles were found to indirectly influence sleep through relationship satisfaction. However, we did find that the happier someone’s relationship was, the less impact that their insecure attachment had on their sleep.
So, even though someone’s insecure attachment style may put a certain amount of strain on their relationship, a healthy, happy, and supportive relationship may assist in alleviating whatever attachment distress they may have, which could lead to better sleep.
In the individual relationship groups, we found that only those within romantic relationships had their sleep influenced by their attachment, and then mitigated by relationship satisfaction. We think that’s because of the proximity of romantic attachment figures, and also because romantic partners may be somewhat dependent on each other for emotional security and happiness within their relationship. This may promote a greater frequency of attachment distress, which may increase mental alertness which may impair sleep. It’s likely that those who are single, don’t have the same manner of relationship with their attachment figure, and may be responsible for their own emotional security.
A really interesting find was that greater levels of anxious attachment contributed to BETTER sleep quality for those who are married. Research has found that Marriage may have more positive elements than non-married relationships, such as support, equality, trust, etc. We think it’s possible that these positive elements may have helped ease attachment concerns as they arose, so the greater the intensity, the greater the support. This may then have contributed to better sleep.
So there you have it. What we basically found was that happy relationships help you sleep better, and can protect against other pesky psychological nuisances. So get out there, get happy!
tl;dr Happy relationships may assist in mitigating the impact that certain insecure attachment styles may have on sleep quality - but only if its a romantic relationship.
*******Thank you so much to everyone who dedicated their time to take part in the study. I really, really appreciate it. You guys are the best.******
