Reporting what we found

Due to the pandemic the publication of The People’s Trial results were delayed. Thank you for understanding, coronavirus did delay us, but it hasn’t stopped The People’s Trial!

Thank you to everyone who took part in The People’s Trial! We couldn’t have done it without you!! As a reminder, we asked the public to suggest questions we might use for The People’s Trial. We then asked the public to help us find the most popular question; the one The People’s Trial would investigate. The question chosen by the public for The People’s Trial to tackle was:

Does reading a book in bed make a difference to sleep in comparison to not reading a book in bed?

What’s more, we didn’t find any research that already showed whether reading really makes a difference to sleep and if so by how much. We asked for your help to tackle this question and 991 people agreed to take part in the trial.

These 991 people were put into one of two groups: 496 (50%) went into the ‘reading a book in bed’ group (called the intervention group) and 495 (50%) went into the ‘not reading a book’ group (called the control group). Who got what was decided by chance (called randomisation), which meant that everyone had an equal chance of being in the intervention group or in the control group. …. and we asked people to do this for 7 days.

‘Not everyone completed the trial. This sometimes happens in trials (even though it is something we’d like to avoid). In this trial, 127 (25.6%) people randomised to reading a book in bed (the intervention group) and 90 (18.18%) people randomised to not reading a book in bed (the control group) did not finish the trial.

People who didn’t complete the trial were mainly younger or told us they had terrible sleep quality to start with.

The results of The People’s Trial are presented in the infographic below:

Click image to download