Perceived Discrimination and Adolescent Sleep in a Community Sample

Authors

Bridget J. Goosby, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Jacob Cheadle, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow
Whitney Strong-Bak, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow
Taylor C. Roth, University of Nebraska–LincolnFollow
Timothy D. Nelson, University of Nebraska–LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

2018

Citation

Goosby, Bridget J., Jacob E. Cheadle, Whitney Strong-Bak, Taylor C. Roth, and Timothy D. Nelson. 2018. “Perceived Discrimination and Adolescent Sleep in a Community Sample.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 4(4): 43–61.

DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2018.4.4.03.

Comments

© 2018 Russell Sage Foundation. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Abstract

Sleep is a key restorative process, and poor sleep is linked to disease and mortality risk. The adolescent population requires more sleep on average than adults but are most likely to be sleep deprived. Adolescence is a time of rapid social upheaval and sensitivity to social stressors including discrimination. This study uses two weeks of daily e-diary measures documenting discrimination exposure and concurrent objective sleep indicators measured using actigraphy. We assess associations between daily discrimination and contemporaneous sleep with a diverse sample of adolescents. This novel study shows youth with higher average discrimination reports have worse average sleep relative to their counterparts. Interestingly, youth reporting daily discrimination have better sleep the day of the report than youth who do not.