With the threat of later-in-life conditions like obesity, diabetes, heart disease and depression as a side effect of insufficient sleep, it is critical to examine sleep patterns in both children and adults.
The 24rd annual National Symposium on Family Issues is being held today and tomorrow at the Nittany Lion Inn on Penn State’s University Park campus. Being hosted by Penn State’s Social Science and Population Research Institutes, the symposium will featured 14 leading researchers in health and human development as well as behavioral and social sciences. Registration is free to Penn State students, faculty, and staff and is still open.
“This year’s symposium is aimed at stimulating novel research directions by bringing together family scholars from a range of disciplines with scholars who are renowned for their research on how best to study sleep and its health impacts,” said Director for the Social Science Research Institute Susan McHale. Sessions include establishing healthy sleep patterns, couple relationships and sleep, and the social ecologies of sleep. In addition to symposium sessions, on Tuesday there will be a sleep studies methodologies workshop.
McHale said she is most excited to hear from the family scholars. “Family scholars are well-positioned to contribute to the limited research on the role of the social environment in healthful sleep patterns,” she said.
For more information or to register, visit the National Symposium on Family Issues’ website.
The symposium series is funded in part by a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Other sponsors include Penn State’s Population Research and Social Science Research Institutes; the Children, Youth and Families Consortium; the Prevention Research Center; and the Penn State Departments of Sociology and Criminology; Human Development and Family Studies; Psychology; Anthropology; and Biobehavioral Health.