Agreement Among Subjective, Objective, and Collateral Measures of Insomnia in Postwithdrawal Recovering Alcoholics

The level of agreement among objective, subjective, and collateral assessments of insomnia was examined in 56 recovering alcoholics. Participants underwent a multimodal sleep assessment protocol consisting of sleep logs, actigraph recordings, questionnaires, and collateral reports of insomnia severity. All sleep measures confirmed moderate to severe insomnia in the study sample. Over 1 week of simultaneous sleep log and actigraph recording, the average disagreement between methods ranged from 16 min for sleep onset latency to 1 hr for wake time after sleep onset. Interrater agreement for the severity of insomnia symptoms using the Sleep Impairment Index was poor for subject-clinician, subject-collateral, and collateral-clinician rating pairs (intraclass correlation coefficients < .35). In general, recovering alcoholics' self-reported sleep reflected a greater severity of insomnia symptoms than did the actigraph and collateral measures. Given that such high levels of disagreement can occur in individual participants, researchers are advised to use a combination of sleep measures to assess insomnia in this population.