Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine
36 How Do Minority Women View the Importance of Sleep?
Kharisma Carmichael
Faculty Mentor: Kelly Glazer Baron (Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Utah)
When it comes to living a healthy lifestyle, sleep plays a huge role in being able to do that. Sleep can affect one’s mental health, physical health, attitude, and so much more. When one does not have enough sleep, they are subject to not think as clearly, be a little short-tempted, and just become overall less productive. From personal experience, many people in my community do not discuss the challenges of trying to get adequate sleep. Many just see sleep as a sacrifice sometimes, or an end to a means if you will. Some do not really realize the effect that it has on one’s physical health, especially women. This past summer, I was provided the chance to better understand how women, especially minority women, view sleep and where it falls on their list of priorities.
The Sweet Dreams project is a qualitative study that focused on the challenges that many minority women face when it comes to being able to make enough time for them to sleep. This study focused on the barriers and facilitators of sleep health among women who identified as a member of the following communities: African American, Immigrant/Refugee, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and Hispanic/Latinx. The study is a multi-year project that will help develop a sleep health intervention for the women in the provided communities based out of Utah. The participants are Community Health Workers (CHW) that were recruited from our 4 study communities. We then completed online and in person focus groups that were conducted with our CHWs (Community Health Workers) by their ethnicity. These interviews were conducted by a racially and ethnically matched facilitator. The focus group facilitators utilized a structured interview guide that helped us to analysis many distinct categories of sleep. The transcripts were then transcribed, translated, and uploaded into a qualitative software called Dedoose.
The main categories I helped with understanding themes from were sleep importance, beliefs/attitudes, and sleep behavior (focused on the area of sleep routine). The results found in these specified areas were interesting, and sort of eye opening to me. Beginning with sleep importance. Coming into this study I had the line of thinking that women, especially women from our studied communities, did not understand the importance of sleep. I was in fact wrong, women from the communities of African Americans, Immigrants/Refugees, Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, and Hispanics/Latinx often understood the importance of sleep, but other factors just continued to take priority. Some examples of these priorities are taking care of their children, trying to be the heart of their family, trying to meet the requirements for their jobs or schooling, and just all around trying to complete their needed tasks. Overall, women understood the importance of sleep, but just had other things to accomplish that they deemed more important. It was also found that there were not any open conversations about sleep in these communities. Another thing that I realized when it came to importance of sleep is that sleep often begun to move higher up on the priority list when one started to feel sick.
This then leads us to the discussion of sleep attitudes/beliefs. Among most of the communities sleep was seen as a healing process. When the body began not to feel well, one had to rest to be able to get better. Some also believed that to have better sleep duration and sleep quality, one must address the issues or stressors they were facing in their life. Many women from different communities believed that the physical movement, and their diet affected their quality of sleep as well. When they tended to be active and ate healthier, they felt that they saw better sleep duration, and sleep quality. The research also found that dreams were often seen as signs or warnings. One of the most common themes when it comes to sleep attitudes/beliefs was the fact that sleep was often seen as laziness. Sleep for an extended number of hours, or just lounging around was just equated to one being lazy, unproductive, or even sometimes depressed.
When it came to the category of sleep behavior, especially sleep routine, it was found that it was hard for women to keep a routine. This was seen as being caused by other people in their household having different schedules than them, having to tend to their kids or family members, and just needing to get other things done. An activity that I found interesting was the fact that the Immigrant/Refugee was used to taking naps and breaks throughout the day. It wasn’t until they moved to the United States that they were introduced to the working from sunup to sundown mentality. Other factors that affected their sleep routines were the need to co-sleep with a relative, adapting to their environments, being awoken by family members, and trying to find a balance between various aspects of their life.
In summary from the research gathered we were able to understand that women from our participating minority communities understood the importance of sleep. It was just seen that other things began to take priority. For the next steps, the CHWs will participate in data collection to look at time tradeoffs if sleep in real life. Results will be used to put together an intervention that will be led by CHWs.
Thank you to Dr.Baron and her lab members. You all have made this summer one for the books. You guys have taught me to be kind to myself, reminded me to continue to persevere. I am grateful that each of you allowed me to do what I wanted at the start of the program. You allowed me to be like a sponge and allowed me to soak up as much knowledge as I could. To the Utah Resiliency team, thank you for always being a listening ear and providing me with guidance. Lastly, to the Office of Undergraduate Research thank you for everything. Thank you for the encouragement, the gatherings, and helping me to improve my networking skills.