Grant: Team Grant: Sleep Research Consortium

The quality and quantity of our sleep affects the health of every Canadian, but we don't all start from the same place in life. We are interested in the factors that cause modifiable differences (inequities) in sleep health. The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has produced a set of guidelines for analyzing quantitative health data from an intersectional point of view. Intersectionality refers to the ways in which different aspects of a person's identity, such as ethnicity/race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status (SES), geographic location, and others, interact to shape not only their experiences but also their access to resources, opportunities, and social power. The CIHR Sleep Consortium was formed to generate new knowledge about sleep health that will inform clinical practice and support public health initiatives to deliver resources where they are most needed. Current funded research themes within the Consortium include sleep and mental health, and sleep across the life cycle. As a part of the Sleep Consortium, we will apply the PHAC guidelines to a series of existing datasets that have tracked sleep habits and behaviours in various Canadian populations over time in different ways. Doing this work properly requires consulting with diverse people with lived experiences of sleep troubles. It also requires appropriate research with Indigenous communities by Indigenous researchers. This funding will make it possible for us to engage directly with diverse members of the public, including Indigenous communities, to find out what healthy sleep looks like to them. This knowledge will teach us about intersectionality as it relates to sleep research and public health interventions. We will apply that knowledge to our sleep datasets, and share what we learn with other researchers in the Consortium and with public health agencies, to assist with public health efforts such as measuring sleep health and habits or developing policies related to childcare.