A Sleep Hygiene Intervention to Improve Sleep Health in Urban, Latino Middle School Children

Description

Sleep is essential for optimal health and development. Poor sleep is associated with impaired functioning and academic performance, and worse health outcomes in children. Latino children are disproportionately present in urban settings, and due to their exposure to higher levels of urban and cultural stressors, are at greater risk for poor sleep hygiene and quality.

SIESTA (School Intervention to Enhance Latino Students’ Time Asleep) is a novel sleep hygiene intervention for improving sleep hygiene and sleep duration in urban Latino middle schoolers in two geographic areas with a high proportion of urban Latino children at increased risk for poor sleep health: Providence, Rhode Island, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

SIESTA involves 4 group sessions administered in school to Latino middle schoolers (6th-8th grade) and two child-caregiver sessions administered remotely by a bilingual (English/Spanish) trained facilitator from the community.

The goal of this project is to administer a two-site hybrid type 1 effectiveness-implementation design to evaluate SIESTA’s effects on a larger-scale- for addressing Latino middle schooler’s sleep health, while also assessing implementation determinants.

The first aim of the study is to evaluate SIESTA through a large-scale RCT with urban middle school students in Providence, RI and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The researchers will enroll 150 Latino children per site (N=300), and randomly assign them either to the SIESTA intervention, or to the Sleep Education plus Child Health attention-control condition (9 groups of each of the two conditions, per site; 8-9 students per group). Treatment effects on primary sleep outcomes will be evaluated, including sleep duration, efficiency and sleep onset latency. Secondary sleep outcomes will include sleep hygiene behaviors, the sleep environment, and sleep-related disturbances and impairment. Assessments will occur prior to, immediately following, and at 4, 8, and 12 months after the intervention.

Each participant will be active in the protocol over approximately 14 months, during which it is hypothesized that SIESTA participants will have improved sleep outcomes, sleep hygiene behaviors and less sleep-related impairment relative to Controls.

The second study aim is to identify implementation determinants and preliminary implementation outcomes of SIESTA to prepare for future large-scale implementation in other urban school settings. A mixed methods process evaluation will be implemented, with input from community partners using the RE-AIM framework throughout and following administration of the RCT.

SIESTA has the potential to improve sleep outcomes in urban Latino children and their daytime functioning, and to address a critical gap of the need for tailored and effective sleep hygiene interventions for children at greater risk for poor sleep health.