A Sleep Hygiene Intervention to Improve Sleep Quality in Urban, Latino Middle School Children - Phase 1

Overview

Sleep is essential for children's daytime functioning and health. Poorer sleep hygiene can negatively affect sleep outcomes in children. Urban Latino children are at greater risk for poor sleep hygiene and poor quality sleep due to exposure to higher levels of urban and cultural stressors. This project aims to refine and test a novel school-based intervention to improve sleep hygiene and in turn, sleep quality in urban Latino middle school children. An existing sleep hygiene intervention that has been shown to improve sleep in urban children will be culturally and contextually tailored and has the potential to exert greater improvements in sleep hygiene and sleep outcomes for this high-risk group.

Not sleeping long or soundly enough can lead to health problems in children, including more asthma symptoms and risk for obesity. Latino children might be especially at risk for poor sleep and worse asthma. Therefore, the goal of this study is to adapt an existing intervention called Sleep Smart for use with urban Latino middle school students. The new program will be called "Sleep Smart Latino" (SSL), the goal of which is to improve sleep quality among Latino, middle school-aged children in urban public schools. SSL will be administered by trained community members to a group of Latino middle school children who are at risk for poor sleep quality. The program will be tested in San Juan, Puerto Rico and Providence, Rhode Island. The first aim of this project is to refine the SS intervention and intervention procedures so that they eventually can be used in a larger study of the intervention's effectiveness. Refinement will involve a) translation and cultural tailoring for Latino middle school students, b) enhancement of the parent component, and c) ensuring applicability to the urban, middle school setting in both sites (PR and RI). In-depth interviews with caregivers (N=20-25), focus groups (middle school students \[N = 5\], caregivers \[N =5\], and school staff \[N = 5\]), and Investigators with expertise in culturally tailored interventions will provide input. The second aim of this project is to test the feasibility of the SSL intervention and training procedures through an Open Trial, to refine intervention modules and the training approach that will be used in the larger study. The Open Trial will include 15 adolescent participants at each study site. The third aim of this project is to test the SSL intervention through a Pilot Randomized Control Trial (RCT) to provide estimates of effect size that will be used to inform the sample size for the larger study. The RCT will include 75 adolescent participants at each study site. We expect the participants in the SSL intervention will have improvement on the following primary sleep quality outcomes (improved sleep duration and sleep efficiency) as measured by actigraphy, relative to the control conditions. Secondarily, we expect participants in SSL will show a decrease in total daily caloric intake relative to the control conditions. This registration refers only to aim 1 of the project.