by The new sleep studies used federal data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and the American Time Use Survey between 2013 and 2019. The researchers used those time-stamped surveys of about 190,000 Black people and about 1,846. 000 white people who had been called at random. by phone and were asked, among other things, how much they slept.
Then, using statistical data from the Mapping police violence database, researchers identified whether a police killing of an unarmed black person had occurred in the respondent’s state within the previous three months. If they found one, they compared the respondent’s sleep duration with that of people who had been called before the murder. They also compared the responses with those of people surveyed at a similar time, but outside the region.
Survey responses were sorted by whether respondents’ total sleep duration was less than seven hours, considered “short sleep,” or six hours, considered “very short sleep,” since that threshold has been associated even more closely with poor health outcomes.
After controlling for a number of factors, such as seasonal temperatures and unemployment rates, they found that blacks were 2.7 percent more likely to sleep less than seven hours in the first three months after an officer had been involved in the murder of an unarmed black man. person in his state compared to before the murder, and 6.5 percent more likely to report less than six hours of sleep compared to before.
To address potential biases, the researchers looked at associations between sleep and other events, such as police killings of armed blacks or unarmed whites, but found no significant links. They also applied regression models to samples of white respondents and found that the associations between sleep and police killings were not statistically significant.
To account for the fact that police killings were likely to affect people in other states, they designed a second study, which 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 subtracting the differences seen in white respondents from those seen in black respondents.
Here, the magnitude of the findings was even greater. In the nationwide analysis, researchers found that blacks were 4.6 percent more likely to sleep less than seven hours and 11.4 percent more likely to sleep less than six hours in the months after a murder, compared to whites surveyed during that time.
