Research and the Deceptive Misinformation about Black People

By Charles S. Mombo

I recently read with great interest an article titled, Poll Reveals Sleep Differences among Ethnic Groups. The article was published by the National Sleep Foundation (NSF). The NSF's 2010 Sleep in America poll reveals, according to them, significant differences in the sleep habits and attitudes of Asians, Blacks/African-Americans, Hispanics and Whites.

Today the blogosphere is buzzing about NSF's report. Many are posting articles about this report using one of the below subtitles that were extracted from NSF's poorly prepared sampling:

African American and Hispanics losing more sleep over worries.
African-Americans and Hispanics are ten times more likely to report having sex every night.
Most African-Americans report praying every night.
African-Americans report losing sleep every night over personal financial concerns.

I take issue with the National Sleep Foundation report simply because it was not only poorly prepared but points to some of the weaknesses of various types of samples for surveys. Where did they get their sample of Blacks – BET, the yellow pages or a nightclub?

I don't claim to be a sampling strategies, but at least I have lots of graduate and professional research experiences. NSF's telephone poll only sample 1,000 people from the four ethnic groups. There are approximately 38 million Blacks or African-American in the United States of America and sampling only 1,000 out of such a very large pool of African-American sounds like a joke on what I though was a credible organization – NSF.

In all fairness to NSF, they themselves admitted that they did not know what they were doing when they stated, “It is the first poll to examine sleep among these four ethnic groups”.

To gained new insight into why we sleep the way we do, the National Sleep Foundation needs to do more control and organized research while trying to explore ethnic and family sleep practices.