Latino adolescents' daily bicultural stress and sleep: Gender and school context moderation

Abstract

Objective: Bicultural stress (i.e., challenge arising from navigating 2 cultural contexts) has significant consequences for Latino youth's health, but researchers have yet to examine the implications of bicultural stress for adolescents' sleep. The goals of this study were to examine whether individual and day-to-day (within-person) differences in bicultural stress were associated with Latino adolescents' sleep onset latency (i.e., time to fall asleep), sleep midpoint (i.e., sleep schedule), sleep duration (i.e., time asleep), and subjective sleep quality.

Method: Participants were 209 Latino late adolescents (Mage = 18.10 years; 64.4% female) attending over 90 different high schools who completed 7 daily diary surveys while wearing actigraph wristwatches (N = 1,320 daily observations). Participants also reported sleep problems in a standard survey. Statistical interactions were tested to assess moderation by gender and coethnic school composition.

Results: On average, more bicultural stressors across the week were associated with lower average sleep duration and more sleep problems for male (compared to female) adolescents and youth attending schools with higher (compared to lower) Latino student enrollment. Regarding day-to-day differences, more daily bicultural stressors than usual predicted longer sleep onset latency that night for male adolescents, earlier sleep midpoint that night, and less sleep duration that night for youth attending higher Latino-enrollment schools.

Conclusions: Latino adolescents' everyday experiences of bicultural stress relate to differences in sleep duration, timing, and quality, with important variation by gender and school context. Results advance existing theory regarding social position factors that differentiate the health implications of bicultural stress for Latino youth. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Figure 1:

Simple slopes for associations of bicultural stress (+/−1 SD from grand mean or within-person mean) with sleep by gender. *p < .05.a Figure 1a: Simple slopes for association of average daily bicultural stress (+/−1 SD from grand mean) with sleep duration by gender. *p < .05. Figure 1b: Simple slopes for association of average daily bicultural stress (+/−1 SD from grand mean) with subjective sleep problems by gender. *p < .05. Figure 1c: Simple slopes for association of daily bicultural stress (+/−1 SD from within-person mean) with sleep onset latency by gender. *p < .05.

Figure 2:

Simple slopes for associations of bicultural stress (+/−1 SD from grand mean or within-person mean) with sleep by co-ethnic school composition (+/− 1 SD from grand mean). ‡p = .11. *p < .05. Figure 2a: Simple slopes for association of average daily bicultural stress (+/−1 SD from grand mean) with subjective sleep problems by co-ethnic school composition (+/−1 SD from grand mean). *p < .05. Figure 2b: Simple slopes for association of daily bicultural stress (+/−1 SD from within-person mean) with sleep duration by co-ethnic school composition (+/−1 SD from grand mean). ‡p = .11. *p < .05.