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Avi Sadeh, Commentary: Comparing Actigraphy and Parental Report as Measures of Children's Sleep, Journal of Pediatric Psychology, Volume 33, Issue 4, May 2008, Pages 406–407, https://doi.org/10.1093/jpepsy/jsn018
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Sleep in children can be assessed using a variety of methods. Direct observations, self-reports, parental reports, time-lapse video, actigraphy, and polysomnography have been repeatedly used in pediatric sleep research and clinical practice. Parental reports have always been a main source of information on children's sleep. Caregiver observations, in questionnaire or diary format, can provide detailed description of the child's sleep schedule, night-wakings, and sleep-related behaviors such as resistance to go sleep or to sleep alone, sleep walking, night terrors, and other parasomnia. Parents can also provide information about snoring, restless and disrupted sleep, or even apneic pauses, which are important markers of sleep-disordered breathing.
Over the last two decades, actigraphy has become an increasingly useful sleep assessment research and clinical tool in infants, children, and adults (Ancoli-Israel et al., 2003; Sadeh & Acebo, 2002; Sadeh, Hauri, Kripke, & Lavie, 1995); in this special issue, three of the five original research studies that examined sleep parameters utilized actigraphic measurement. Actigraphy is based on a wristwatch like device, which is attached to the child's wrist (or the ankle in the case of infants), and provides continuous monitoring of activity level that can be translated to reliable and valid estimates of sleep–wake measures. The main advantage of actigraphy is that it provides an objective description of sleep for extended periods in the child's natural setting. Validation studies of specific devices against standard polysomnography have yielded between 85% and 95% agreement for sleep–wake scoring.
