Perceived stress, sleep, and psychosocial health among Mexican-origin adolescents from immigrant families

Mexican-origin adolescents face multiple stressors in their daily lives. They also struggle with insufficient sleep, poor quality sleep (Guglielmo, Gazmararian, Chung, Rogers, & Hale, 2018), and high risk of mental health problems (American Psychiatric Association, 2017). Sleep is a restorative process essential to health and development: it can be seen either as a downstream outcome (an important health indicator) that may be influenced by stress directly, or mediated by psychosocial health indirectly; or as an upstream indicator that mediates the process of stress impacting psychosocial health. The current dissertation aims to depict sleep patterns (Study I) and understand the mechanism behind cumulative stress, sleep, and psychosocial health from both a daily perspective (Study I) and a chronic perspective (Study II) among a sample of low-income Mexican-origin adolescents. Data were retrieved from a three-wave longitudinal project (W1: N = 604, Mage = 12.41, SD = 0.97; W2: N = 483, Mage = 13.22, SD = 0.95; W3: N = 334, Mage = 17.10, SD = 1.12) that measured stress, sleep, and psychosocial outcomes among Mexican-origin adolescents in central Texas from 2014 to early 2020. At W3, the project also initiated a four-day diary study with a sub-sample (N = 277, Mage = 16.93, SD = 1.00) to record adolescents’ daily sleep with actigraphy-based measures. Study I, the daily study, found that the sample displays a sleep pattern with insufficient time but good quality. Study I found evidence to support sleep duration only as a downstream outcome that is being directly impacted by average cumulative stress; marginal trends were found for latency as a downstream outcome directly influenced by daily/average cumulative stress. From a longitudinal perspective, Study II found support for sleep quality as both a downstream outcome impacted by perceived contextual stress directly, or indirectly via depressive symptoms, and an upstream indicator that mediates the links between stress and psychosocial health outcomes. Altogether, the current dissertation provides initial empirical evidence that sleep may be conceptualized as a downstream outcome of daily stress; whereas chronically, sleep can be considered as both a downstream and an upstream indicator in the stress-health model.