• Nicole G Nahmod, Lindsay Master, Heather F McClintock, Lauren Hale, and Orfeu M Buxton.
• Department of Biobehavioral Health, Pennsylvania State University, 221 Biobehavioral Health Building, University Park, PA, 16802, USA. NikkiNahmod@gmail.com.
• J Urban Health. 2022 Feb 1; 99 (1): 102115102-115.

AbstractDifferential social and contextual environments may contribute to adolescent sleep disparities, yet most prior studies are limited to self-reported sleep data and have not been conducted at a national level, limiting the variation in neighborhood contexts. This study examined the association between neighborhood disadvantage and objective measures of adolescent sleep. A racially and geographically diverse sample of American adolescents (N = 682) wore wrist-worn accelerometers, "actigraphs," for ≥ 5 nights. Neighborhood disadvantage was calculated using a standardized index of neighborhood characteristics (proportion of female-headed households, public assistance recipients, households in poverty, adults without high school degrees, and unemployed). Adolescents in more disadvantaged neighborhoods spent more time awake after falling asleep (4.0 min/night, p < .05), a greater percentage of nighttime sleep intervals awake (1%, p < .01), and had less consistent sleep duration (11.6% higher standard deviation, p < .05). Sleep duration and timing did not differ across neighborhood groups. These findings demonstrate that adolescents who live in more disadvantaged neighborhoods have lower quality, less consistent sleep.© 2021. The New York Academy of Medicine.

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