Examining Self Perceived Health and Sleep across Subgroups: Disability, Race, and Educational Attainment

Research Objectives: To examine the relationship between self-reported health and sleep across subgroups: disability, race, and educational attainment.

Design: Online self-administered survey with analysis including descriptive statistics, gamma, and chi-squared.

Setting: General community.

Participants: 102 Georgians with custody of their grandchildren completed an online survey, which included topics on health, nutrition, disability, and demographic information.

Interventions: None

Main Outcome Measures: Sleep is measured via the components of the Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index (PSQI): subjective sleep quality (M=1.2), sleep latency (M=1.7), sleep duration (M=1.0), sleep efficiency (M=0.7), sleep disturbance (M=1.4), use of sleep medication (M=0.9), and daytime dysfunction (M=1.2).

Self-reported health was measured via a single indicator “Would you say that, in general, your health is ….” with response options of excellent (5.9%), very good (28.7%), good (40.6%), fair (17.8%), and poor (6.9%) where higher values indicate a worse overall health.

Results: Overall, people with better overall health reported higher subjective sleep quality, latency, duration, and efficiency in addition to lower daytime dysfunction compared to people with poor self-perceived health.

Disabled people with good overall health, however, only had better subjective sleep quality and sleep latency. For people without disabilities, those with better health reported better sleep quality, duration, and efficiency in addition to less daytime dysfunction.

Black people with better health experience better subjective sleep quality, latency, duration, and efficiency. White people with better health only reported higher subjective sleep quality, lower daytime dysfunction, and shorter sleep duration.

Healthy respondents with a High School diploma (or less) reported poorer sleep efficiency while those who attended college reported better subjective sleep quality, sleep latency, sleep duration, and lower daytime dysfunction.

Only statistically significant findings are reported (p=0.05 cutoff).

Conclusions: Overall health is directly related to sleep. Those relationships, however, are not consistent across subgroups of people. Thus, when clinicians and researchers investigate sleep for patients, they need to take into account not only the various facets of sleep in relation to a patient’s overall health, but also the intersectional identities of the patient.

Author(s) Disclosures: None.