%0 Journal Article
%T Insomnia symptoms and repressive coping in a sample of older Black and White women
%A Girardin Jean-Louis
%A Carol Magai
%A Nathan S Consedine
%A Jessy Pierre-Louis
%A Ferdinand Zizi
%A Georges J Casimir
%A Louis Belzie
%J BMC Women's Health
%D 2007
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1472-6874-7-1
%X A total of 1274 women (average age = 59.36 ¡À 6.53 years) participated in the study; 28% were White and 72% were Black. Older women in Brooklyn, NY were recruited using a stratified, cluster-sampling technique. Trained staff conducted face-to-face interviews lasting 1.5 hours acquiring sociodemographic data, health characteristics, and risk factors. A sleep questionnaire was administered and individual repressive coping styles were assessed. Fisher's exact test and Spearman and Pearson analyses were used to analyze the data.The rate of insomnia symptoms was greater among White women [74% vs. 46%; ¦Ö2 = 87.67, p < 0.0001]. Black women scored higher on the repressive coping scale than did White women [Black = 37.52 ¡À 6.99, White = 29.78 ¡À 7.38, F1,1272 = 304.75, p < 0.0001]. We observed stronger correlations between repressive coping and insomnia symptoms for Black [rs = -0.43, p < 0.0001] than for White women [rs = -0.18, p < 0.0001]. Controlling for variation in repressive coping, the magnitude of the correlation between ethnicity and insomnia symptoms was substantially reduced. Multivariate adjustment for differences in sociodemographics, health risk factors, physical health, and health beliefs and attitudes had little effect on the relationships.Relationships between ethnicity and insomnia symptoms are jointly dependent on the degree of repressive coping, suggesting that Black women may be reporting fewer insomnia symptoms because of a greater ability to route negative emotions from consciousness. It may be that Blacks cope with sleep problems within a positive self-regulatory framework, which allows them to deal more effectively with sleep-interfering psychological processes to stressful life events and to curtail dysfunctional sleep-interpreting processes.In the social science literature, ethnicity is often considered a proxy for socioeconomic constructs and sociocultural factors. In the context of sleep medicine, ethnicity might play a unique role in understandin
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6874/7/1