The impact of school shutdown on sleep in adolescents: a natural experiment

Little bit of a tangent, but I have adopted a novel alarm clock application called "Suntimes Alarms". This alarm clock is programmed according to an offset of solar events (for me the sunrise, but if you want something for noon or sunset that is possible). This recent DST was the smoothest transition in many years. Particularly because I was not beholden to a stringent work schedule. I was free to set my hours a bit more flexibly.

N=45 is relatively high power for simple analyses, like a t-test (not sure if that's what the paper did).

You can detect an effect size of 0.6 with 80% power when N is 45. You can also detect a effect of 0.7 with 90% power at N=45.

There are other things that can make results unreliable, like p-hacking, but a sample size of 45 is not a sufficient condition for bad science.

That is unrelated to the school schedule. Most bus drivers aren't going to care if their routes start at 6, 7 and 8am or 8, 9 and 10am.

So, I agree it's an interesting idea, and I think this small study could hopefully spur more conclusive ones, but...

1) N=45

2) based on "semi-structured phone interview"

Neither of these is a deal-breaker, but what you'd really prefer is some sort of objective measure of sleep quantity, and how it impacted the person. Teenagers are, by and large, entirely aware that when adults ask them questions, they are likely to draw conclusions about policy towards teenagers. They want to sleep later. How likely is it that they would admit it, if they didn't really get any more sleep out of this?

Not saying it's not true, or that it isn't an interesting idea to try to put this "natural experiment" to work somehow, but I'm not sure this is really enough to draw any conclusions, and I actually already agreed with their conclusion before seeing this study.

A better method might be to compare home-school students to public schools, or compare summer-break to school year, and to use some more objective metric than a phone interview.

I agree that the proximal driver is cost cutting.

But it’s largely tolerated because of the widespread cultural belief that waking up early is “character-building”. As if a late-shifted chronotype is a sign of laziness and sloth.