The new sleep studies looked at federal data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and the American Time Use Survey between 2013 and 2019. The researchers used these dated surveys of about 190,000 blacks and about 1,846,000 whites who were randomly called by telephone and they asked, among other things, how much sleep they got.
Then, using statistical data from the Mapping Police Violence database, the researchers identified whether a police killing of an unarmed black person had occurred in a survey respondent’s state within the previous three months. If they found one, they compared the respondent’s sleep duration with that of the subjects called before the murder. They also compared the answers with those of people who were interviewed at the same time, but outside the region.
Survey responses were classified according to whether respondents’ total sleep duration fell below seven hours, considered “short sleep,” or six hours, considered “very short sleep,” as this threshold has been even more closely associated with poor health outcome.
After controlling for a range of factors, including seasonal temperatures and unemployment rates, they found that blacks were 2.7 percent more likely to get less than seven hours of sleep in the first three months after a police officer was involved in the killing of an unarmed black man. person in their condition compared to before the murder and 6.5% more likely to report less than six hours of sleep compared to before.
To address potential bias, the researchers looked for associations between sleep and other events, such as police killings of armed blacks or unarmed whites, but found no significant relationships. They also ran regression models on samples of white respondents and found that associations between sleep and police killings were not statistically significant.
To account for the fact that police killings were likely to affect people across state lines, they designed a second study, one that looked at the influence of high-profile killings at the national level. The study compared changes in sleep patterns among black respondents before and after the murders with changes among white respondents — essentially removing the differences seen in white respondents from those seen in blacks.
Here, the magnitude of the findings was even greater. In the national analysis, the researchers found that blacks were 4.6% more likely to report less than seven hours of sleep and 11.4% more likely to report less than six hours of sleep in the months after the murder compared to whites who participated in the research. that time.
