Police Stops and Sleep among Black and Latino Adolescents: Does Ethnic-Racial Socialization Confer Protection?

• In Event: Antecedents and Consequences of Sleep Patterns and Ethnic-Racial Discrimination among Ethnically-Racially Diverse Youth

Abstract

Background: Racial disparities in policing and sleep have been documented with important implications to disparities in developmental competencies. For instance, Black and Latino youth have reported being unfairly targeted by the police and to subsequently experience psychological distress (Brunson & Miller, 2006; Solis, Portillos, & Brunson, 2009). Black and Latino youth have also been found to show more problematic sleep, such poorer sleep quantity and quality, relative to Whites (for review, see Yip & Cheon, 2020). In turn, problematic sleep is associated with a swath of developmental competencies, including worse achievement (Levy, Heissel, Richeson, & Adam, 2016) and psychopathology (Yip & Cheon, 2020). Considering that sleep is responsive to environmental stress, we examined whether police stops contribute to sleep and identified factors that may reduce such effects.

Parental cultural socialization and preparation for bias practices have been posited as protective mechanisms among youth of color (Garcia Coll et al., 1996). Cultural socialization is a process by which children learn about their cultural heritage, traditions, and history, while preparation for bias imparts messages that reactively or proactively prepare children to cope with and anticipate discrimination. Thus, we investigated whether cultural socialization and preparation for bias reduced the negative effects of police stops on youth’s sleep outcomes.

Method: Data came from two daily diary studies in which the first sampled Black and White adolescents (n=343; 43% White) and the second targeted Asian and Latino adolescents (n=111; 42% Asian). Too few White (n=8) and Asian youth (n=2) were stopped by the police to be included. In both studies, youth reported being stopped by the police at baseline (Geller & Fagan, 2019), parents reported their engagement in cultural socialization and preparation for bias at baseline (Huguley, Delale-O’Connor, & Wang, 2020), and youth reported their daily sleep behaviors (i.e., sleep duration, sleep quality, and daytime tiredness; Owens et al., 2000) over a 14-day period. Covariates included age, gender, parental education, and enrollment in a free- lunch program.

Results: Across both studies, 15% of Black and Latino youth were stopped by the police. Police stops predicted poorer sleep quality and greater daytime tiredness among Black youth, but police stops were unrelated to sleep behaviors among Latino youth. After using simple slope analyses to plot significant interaction terms, we found that cultural socialization and preparation for bias conferred protection on specific sleep outcomes among Black youth, but racial socialization produced mixed results among Latino youth.

Conclusion: Findings highlight the role of law enforcement in shaping racial disparities in sleep outcomes. This finding should not be overlooked, as negative sleep predicts many health-related risks (Medic, Wille, & Hemels, 2017). In addition, the fact that the protective nature of racial socialization differed between Black and Latino youth not only supports extant studies (Hughes et al., 2008; Pollard, 2017) but is paramount in providing interventions with information regarding how parenting can be used to intervene and reduce the negative effects of policing.

Authors

• Juan Del Toro, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
  Presenting Author

• Ming-Te Wang, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author