Assessing Sleep in Blackfeet Families With K-3rd Grade Children

Overview

This project will investigate traditional sleep routines and the current sleep environment in American Indian children to develop a culturally appropriate and novel sleep intervention to increase total sleep time for families with K-3rd grade children. The outcomes of this study will provide a comprehensive understanding of a relatively unknown behavior (sleep) in American Indians, show results from a novel sleep intervention in a high risk and underserved population, and will also contribute to the research and training development of an American Indian investigator, all defined missions of NHLBI.

Children sleep less now than ever before. Despite a growing body of literature in understanding child sleep patterns, sleep interventions are limited. To date, there are no sleep intervention studies that have been done in AI tribal communities. Elders and community members play a critical role in identifying culturally adaptive solutions to address problems in tribal communities. Because of the prevalence of historical trauma and mistrust of outsiders, I am uniquely positioned to do this work in my own tribal community. Preliminary data of sleep patterns showed that Blackfeet children age 2-5 and age 12-15 averaged 10.15 hours and 7.5 hours of weekday sleep. Despite this understanding, evidence-based solutions to increase TST in tribal communities are unknown. Thus, I propose to explore traditional sleep routines coupled with asking Blackfeet families about the current sleep environment in their home to develop a culturally specific sleep intervention with one child and one adult dyad. I hypothesize that the sleep intervention will increase TST (primary outcome) in the dyads. The intervention may also result in improved physical activity and diet, and decreased stress and screen time (secondary outcomes). Data will be measured at 0 and 9 weeks and then at 3 month follow-up. This hypothesis will be tested in the following specific aims: Specific Aim 1: Develop a culturally appropriate sleep intervention for Blackfeet families with K-3rd grade children using surveys, focus groups, interviews, community input, and evidence-based strategies on sleep. Specific Aim 2: Feasibility test of the 9-week sleep intervention with K-3rd grade Blackfeet families. The work proposed in these aims is designed to develop a comprehensive understanding of traditional sleep strategies and the child sleep environment to develop and pilot-test a novel culturally appropriate sleep intervention in the Blackfeet community. Developing culturally specific interventions to increase TST will address two significant gaps in the literature; understanding sleep problems in AI children and pilot-testing culturally adaptive sleep intervention strategies that will inform future research for investigators doing similar work in AI communities and provide direction for an R01 proposal that is one of the outcomes of this work.

Conditions

Interventions

Eligibility

Locations (1)

Outcomes