Stressors of Sleep Tracking: Instrument Development and Validation

The adverse effects of sleep tracking have attracted interest in both practice and research. However, there is limited quantitative research measuring the relationship between the stressors of sleep tracking and its adverse outcomes, such as health anxiety. This paper develops and tests a measurement instrument for stressors related to sleep tracking. We introduce and validate three new stressor constructs: data-perception discrepancy, the pursuit of perfect data, and vague guidance, and four stressors adapted from prior literature: complexity, invasion, inaccuracy, and unreliability. We test our instrument with data from 324 sleep-tracking users. The results show that invasion, unreliability, pursuit of perfect data, and vague guidance have positive effects on health anxiety.