Amy Bohnert, PhD

Dr. Bohnert: Adolescents don’t sleep enough. We know that. And we know that adolescents residing in urban settings, particularly minoritized individuals, sleep even less. The purpose of my study is to investigate how discrimination, a form of stress, can adversely affect the sleep of adolescents.  

We know that not sleeping enough is not good for your health and your wellbeing, both psychologically and physically. But we don’t know a lot about what promotes sleep. And so for this project, we’re really interested in the experiences of discrimination that urban minoritized youth might experience and how that may impact their sleep. What are potential buffers that may intervene in the face of this stress to help promote sleep? We wanted to understand at the individual level what are the different facets like emotional regulation, coping, and religiosity that could help buffer sleep in the face of stress. We also want to understand more about the sleep environments that kids are in.

Are there rules and routines around bedtimes? How comfortable is their sleeping environment? Are they exposed to a lot of noise, and does that interfere with their sleep? So we want to understand more about their sleep hygiene, the sleep environment, the family constellation around routines and rules around bedtime, items such as meal times and other things that may impact on health and wellbeing. We also want to understand more about family cohesiveness because we think that could potentially be a buffer. Finally at the neighborhood level, we understand most of the neighborhood assessments of sleep have really focused on safety. We wanted to take a broader look at the downstream effects of racism by using geocoded location-based indices to examine resources within the community that may protect sleep, and try to better understand other factors such as whether residing within a green space can be sleep protective. 

People have looked at different parts of all of this, but no one has really combined it. So when we think about health behaviors, a lot of people who study this, like I do, embrace what we call an ecological perspective. The idea is that individuals live within families that live within communities. We have to understand all of those influences concurrently to really understand, in this case, individual sleep.

And are you actively in the data collection phase of the study now? Or are you analyzing data?
We are in the data collecting phase, and recruiting has been challenging. We’ve had to pivot and move from being a solely labbased endeavor for collecting data to being out in the community and being able to do community-based data collection. So we’ve gone to some places where we could set up a table and get youth connected.

Given that you are focused on adolescents, do you need to have parental assent and permissions for them to participate in the study?
Yes. We have combined consent and assent. It is part of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process and standards.

How has CHOIR funding been helpful to you?
We’ve learned a lot in this project about how to collect this data, how to do this work, where to recruit, and where we find kids who are willing to participate. It’s been a great opportunity to pilot the study to get important data that we’re going to publish.

What’s next?
We have presented this data at two international conferences, and utilized the pilot data to support a resubmission of an R01 grant. The CHOIR funding really allows us to get the pilot data that we need to make a case that our team can do this. And like I said, we’ve learned things along the way in terms of questions we want to ask and how people answer them. There’s so much value in being able to pilot a project before you really scale it up.