ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sleep
Sec. Sleep, Behavior and Mental Health
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsle.2025.1640355
Development of a scale for measuring orthosomnia: The Bergen Orthosomnia Scale (BOS)
Provisionally accepted
- 1Universitetet i Bergen Institutt for samfunnspsykologi, Bergen, Norway
- 2The University of Utah Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, Salt Lake City, United States
- 3Department of Health Promotion, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Bergen, Norway
- 4Norwegian Competence Center for Sleep Disorders, Bergen, Norway
- 5Universitetet i Bergen Institutt for global helse og samfunnsmedisin, Bergen, Norway
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Introduction: This study aimed to extend the knowledge about orthosomnia, i.e. excessive preoccupation with sleep, by developing a scale for its assessment. Methods: In study 1, an initial item pool was presented to 34 sleep experts for assessment using the Delphi method. In study 2, relevant items were administered to 994 survey respondents (mean age = 42 years, SD = 13.2) for exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Two factors were retained, reflecting "interference" and "rigidity," each comprising six items. In study 3, the scale was validated against multiple validated instruments reflecting sleep-related behaviors and perceptions, the five-factor personality traits, the Dark Triad personality traits, measures of OCD and health anxiety, as well as demographic variables, in a new sample (n = 473, mean age = 41 years, SD = 12.8). Results: The two-factor model demonstrated acceptable fit (RMSEA = .07, CFI = .96, TLI = .95) with alphas of .87 and .88, and 3-week test-retest reliability of .74 and .82, respectively. Both orthosomnia factors correlated positively with sleep effort, dysfunctional beliefs and attitudes about sleep, narcissism, perfectionism, OCD, and health anxiety. The interference factor correlated positively with insomnia, neuroticism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism and negatively with conscientiousness. The rigidity factor correlated positively with conscientiousness. Conclusion: The new scale for assessing orthosomnia possesses good psychometric properties and provides clinicians and researchers with an instrument for further investigations of this new sleep construct.
Keywords: Orthosomnia, scale, Psychometrics, factor analysis, measurement invarance
Received: 03 Jun 2025; Accepted: 09 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Guldbrandsen, Baron, Vedaa, Bjorvatn and Pallesen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ståle Pallesen, Universitetet i Bergen Institutt for samfunnspsykologi, Bergen, Norway
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.