Dr Dayna Johnson Emphasizes the Need for Community Feedback in Sleep Health

Understanding what the community needs when committing to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts is an integral part to helping communities’ improve their sleep health, explains Dayna Johnson, PhD, MPH, MSW, MS, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in this interview from SLEEP 2023.

Transcript

How important are community partnerships to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts?

They're absolutely essential. Without community partnerships, we can't do this work. Something that I like to talk a lot about is the lived experience. What we're doing in this research is really informed by what's a priority to the community, and then what's feasible. It's one thing for us to come up with different ways on how to intervene, but if someone is not amenable to those, then it won't be efficient or effective. So, having those partnerships to find out, “what's the priority? How can we partner to make this change?” And then also for us to understand, “what are the factors that are prohibiting sleep for you?”

As an example, from some of my work, we did focus groups around what we formerly referred to as sleep hygiene, which is really just healthy sleep practices, which include sleeping in a dark, quiet room. We had participants say, "I absolutely can't do that. Someone will break into my house if it's dark." That's not something whoever created these thought about. There's nothing around safety, but it's absolutely important. We have to make sure we're finding out, what are the barriers and facilitators and then using those to leverage the work we're doing to make change.