Complexity in the Association of Socioeconomic Status with Adolescent Sleep

• In Event: Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Topic - Family Context & Processes

Abstract

One way that lower socioeconomic status may produce risk for mental and physical health difficulties during adolescence is through poorer sleep. Adolescents as a whole do not get sufficient sleep (Keyes et al., 2015) and sleep has been shown to be necessary for adolescents’ cognitive functioning (Dewald et al., 2010) and maintaining optimal physical and mental health (Owens et al., 2014; Roberts & Duong, 2014). Some studies have suggested that lower-SES adolescents may be at risk for shorter and poorer quality sleep (Jarrin et al., 2014; Marco et al., 2011), but findings have been inconsistent (Schmeer et al., 2019) or varied by the SES construct examined (Philbrook et al., 2019). Socioeconomic status is multifaceted (Duncan & Magnuson, 2013) and objective measures of SES (e.g. parental education, income-to-needs ratio) may impact adolescent development differently than subjective measures of SES (e.g. perceived economic hardship). Even various objective measures of SES may show different associations given that they tap different types of resources in the home.

The purpose of this study was to examine how multiple measures of SES—namely, income-to-needs ratio, parental education, and perceived economic hardship—were associated with adolescents’ objectively-measured sleep. Three hundred and fifty late adolescents (57% female, mean age=16.4 at Wave 1) participated in a 3-wave longitudinal study in which data was collected at 2-year intervals, from the 10th grade to 3 years post-high school. The sample consisted of ethnically diverse adolescents (42% Latinx, 30% European American, 22% Asian American and 6% identifying with another ethnicity) in the Los Angeles area. Sleep was measured via wrist actigraphy at each study wave for 8 nights to provide an estimate of sleep duration, sleep latency, daily sleep variability, and weekend-weekday differences in sleep duration. Adolescent caregivers reported their education, household size and income, and perceived economic hardship at each study wave. Multilevel models were estimated to examine the associations between SES indices and sleep variables. Age was added as a moderator to examine whether the association between SES and sleep varied as a function of age.

Results suggested divergent findings for financial resources and parental education. Adolescents in families with a higher income-to-needs ratio had a significantly longer sleep duration than their peers (b = 2.62, SE = 1.18, p = 0.03). In contrast, adolescents in families with greater parental education tended to have shorter sleep durations (b = -4.13, SE = 1.88, p = 0.03). Higher parental education also was associated with less daily variability in sleep duration (b = -2.11, SE = 0.88, p = 0.02). Parent-reported economic hardship was not associated with adolescent sleep and age was not found to significantly moderate the overall associations between SES and sleep. Study results suggest that socioeconomic factors differentially influence adolescents’ sleep, and that adolescents with both lower (i.e., lower income-needs ratio) and higher (i.e., parental education) socioeconomic backgrounds may be at risk for shorter sleep. Discussion focuses on the potential mechanisms by which different facets of socioeconomic status may shape adolescent sleep.

Authors

• Sarah Elizabeth Rocha, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Andrew J Fuligni, University of California - Los Angeles
  Non-Presenting Author