Among the international scientists working to awaken greater attention to sleep in government policymaking circles is LDI senior fellow Heather Schofield. She and her research team reviewed the findings and policy implications of their randomized control trial and survey in Chennai, India. The study, “Informing Sleep Policy Through Field Experiences: Evidence is Particularly Needed from Poorer Communities” is published in Science.
The Science study stems from the team’s original sleep study paper published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, titled The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor. Schofield, an assistant professor at both the Perelman School of Medicine and The Wharton School, is also the cofounder and co-director of the Behavioral Development Lab in Chennai, India.
“This all started some years ago when I was working on another research project in Chennai,” says Schofield. “I was walking from my hotel to the research office one morning and I passed this family sleeping on the pavement on the side of a six-lane highway with trucks rumbling by in one direction and cows wandering through in the other. There were honking horns and it was really hot and mosquitoes were everywhere. I wondered, ‘How can they sleep in this?’ That got me thinking about the difference in sleep environments and how that variation might play out in terms of economic implications.”
“Not many people think about the economics of sleep,” Schofield continued. “That surprises me because economics is about making cost and benefit tradeoffs, which is what happens in personal and policy decisions about how much—or what kind of—sleep we get.”
Insufficient sleep is widely recognized in world health circles to be endemic in minority and low-socioeconomic populations around the world. It plays a significant role in the higher rates of poor health common throughout those same populations. Researchers characterize sleep deprivation as “a historically neglected aspect of racial inequity.”
Read more at Penn LDI.
