RAPID: Risk and Resilience Post-Hurricane Harvey: A Longitudinal Examination of Pre-Disaster Sleep in Youth

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This award supports research on children affected by Hurricane Harvey. This research project will examine how Hurricane Harvey and events surrounding the hurricane impacted children's development, particularly children's sleep patterns. Children are especially vulnerable to traumatic events. This project will enhance the ability to identify youth at the highest levels of risk both before and after a natural disaster. It will also provide information about how children react to trauma and how their development is impacted by trauma. The study will have broader impacts, because results will likely help local officials, schools, and parents in disaster-prone communities reduce the long-term effects of catastrophic events on children. Prior research on adults shows that certain sleep patterns either elevate or buffer against psychological risk in the face of a disaster. Little is known about the connections between natural disasters, trauma, sleep, and psychological risk among children. This project will include a sample of youth living in the Houston, Texas metropolitan area during Hurricane Harvey. Those youth completed a comprehensive assessment of sleep and psychological functioning prior to Hurricane Harvey. The current study will take advantage of those data collected before the hurricane. This study will enable data to be collected after the hurricane, which will give investigators the ability to compare pre- and post-hurricane social, emotional, behavioral, and academic functioning using parent, teacher, and youth reports. Researchers will examine whether the presence of certain sleep patterns and features, exhibited by children prior to Hurricane Harvey, decreases or increases risk of poor social, behavioral, emotional, and academic functioning. The primary hypothesis is that pre-disaster sleep characterized by (a) less total and more fragmented REM (rapid eye movement) sleep periods; (b) less slow wave sleep; (c) less sleep spindle activity; and (d) longer sleep onset latency, will amplify the negative effects of hurricane exposure on social, behavioral, emotional, and academic functioning. Emotional functioning will be assessed using subjective reports as well as psychophysiology (electrodermal activity, respiratory sinus arrhythmia). Families will also complete a semi-structured diagnostic clinical interview to assess for psychiatric diagnoses. This study has the potential to inform models of trauma. This study will help the general public better understand the impact natural disasters have on children. This proposal is appropriate for the NSF RAPID mechanism because the ephemeral nature of the data to be collected means there is an urgency to the project. The ability to begin collecting data as soon as possible is crucial.