COPing With Shift Work - Web Based Program for Police Officers

This study is a clinical trial in which 300 Police Officers who currently work midnight
shifts in the participating police departments will be recruited to test the effectiveness
of a new web-based program to address sleep and associated problems related to shift work,
particularly night shift work. Recruitment letters will be sent to all officers currently
working midnight shift, with the goal of recruiting 300 officers willing to participate in
the study. The 300 participants will be randomly assigned to either the experimental group
(receiving the web-based program) or the waitlist control group. Participants in the
experimental group will be given access to the program site (COPing with Shift Work) and the
mobile application (Sleep Tracker). Following completion of the field test, participants in
the control condition (as well as all other interested officers) will have access to the
web-based COPing with Shift Work program.

All participants will be asked to complete a baseline questionnaire containing multiple
measures of sleep, dietary practices, physical activity and job performance. Participants
will be asked to complete the posttest approximately three months following initial access
to the intervention.

Primary and secondary outcome measures: The Primary outcome measures are "sleep quality" as
measured by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and "sleepiness" as measured by the
sleepiness subscale of the widely used Karolinska Sleep Questionnaire (KSQ). The
investigators have adapted the sleep measures to apply to individuals who work nights and
may sleep during the day.

Secondary outcome measures include the Nutritional Patterns Scale, a 13-item modification of
the Block Self-Administered Diet History Questionnaire assessing the nutritional value of
the respondent's diet; Attitudes Toward a Healthy Diet, a 17-item scale, based on the Health
Belief Model and developed and validated by Trenkner and associates assessing perceived
benefits and barriers to eating a healthy diet; the Godin Leisure-Time Exercise
Questionnaire, a brief 4-item query of usual leisure-time exercise habits; and work
productivity measured with the Work Limitations Questionnaire (WLQ), developed and validated
by Lerner and associates.

It is expected that the program group participants will have significantly better outcomes
than the control group at three months.