Although prior studies have examined the impact of smartphone use on sleep and there is a growing interest in the interface between mobile phones and society, researchers know little about how and ...why people use mobile phones before bedtime and in bed. The current research explores this question by drawing on data from sleep diaries and in-depth interviews with 66 Israelis. The results show that the human–mobile phone sleep assemblage generates agentic capacities that allow individuals to engage in a digitally enabled form of what I call sleepful sociality – a sociality marked by sleep. Through the use of mobile phones, individuals create, maintain and/or detach from social relations and fulfil social obligations near bedtime and during sleep, while also trying to facilitate and protect their own and their bed partner’s sleep. These findings enhance the understanding of how technology is enmeshed with sociality and creates new ways of being social.
Abstract
Background
A growing body of research has clarified that sleep is influenced not only by biological factors but also by social factors. While studies have shown that social norms can affect ...sleep behavior and sleeping arrangements, including when, where, how, and with whom people sleep, researchers still know relatively little about how social norms affect sleep health, especially among adults. The current study explores the association between social norms and sleep health in the Israeli context.
Methods
Data were drawn from semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 66 Israelis—including women and men, Arabs and Jews, and religious and non-religious persons—conducted between February 2020 and February 2022. This article focuses on responses to a set of questions about the comments people make or hear from others about their sleep. Exploring how people comment on the sleep of others highlights prevalent social norms around sleep.
Results
Findings indicate that how sleep is “done” is policed by family and community members who react to norm violations by commenting on what is perceived as “inappropriate” sleep behavior. Comments were made in jest or earnest in response to breaches of social norms regarding sleep timing, duration, continuity, and alertness/sleepiness, indicating that social norms and expectations shape each of these sleep health dimensions.
Conclusions
This article expands the scholarly understanding of the social determinants of sleep health. The study concludes that since individuals may opt to conform to current social norms, which are enforced by members of the family and community, interventions aimed at promoting sleep health should target not only individuals but also the family and community.
Scholars have recently begun to discuss joint interviewing from a methodological perspective, generally presenting a favorable view of this mode of interviewing. In the present article, the author ...draws on her experiences with interviewing obstructive sleep apnea patients and their partners to shed further light on the methodological and ethical challenges of joint interviews. Specifically, it is shown that joint interviews may become a site in which one partner silences the other and enacts symbolic violence, with the interviewer as unwilling abettor, or alternatively may facilitate passivity. Joint interviewing may therefore prevent researchers from giving an equal voice to both partners, resulting in partial and fragmented data. In addition, the joint approach may generate tension between members of the couple and harm the quality of relationships, thus contravening the researcher’s commitment to non-maleficence. The author points to a few possible solutions and suggests interviewing social partners as an alternative to couples.
Social scientists have proposed various theories as to when, why, and how people come to seek medical care for multiple conditions. Yet, there is still little empirical research to illustrate the ...pathways into and out of care, especially for chronic illness. This article contributes to this body of work by exploring individuals’ reasons for delaying and seeking care for obstructive sleep apnea, which despite being the most diagnosed sleep disorder, has been largely neglected by social scientists. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 65 Jewish-Israeli obstructive sleep apnea patients, this study shows how intersections of gender, family, and morality shape and are shaped by care-seeking behavior. The analysis reveals that married men claim they do not do health, thereby reaffirming their masculinity, but they maintain moral status because their wives do much of their illness work for them. Unmarried men, however, claim to be more vigilant in their pursuit of health and present it as one of their responsibilities. Women acknowledge they have the double burden of protecting their own health as well as that of their loved ones, and often feel that they are incapable of meeting these social expectations. However, men and women are able to maintain moral status by explaining their neglect of health as resulting from their attempts to care for significant others. Finally, married women differ from men and unmarried women in their motivations for seeking care. In keeping with their gender roles, married women emphasize disturbance to others whereas men stress disturbance to self.
Despite advances in the sociology of sleep, we know relatively little about the experience of co-sleeping in general and about co-sleeping with pets in particular. This study draws on semi-structured ...interviews with Israeli couples who raise either a dog or a cat to show that co-sleeping with partners and pets is a family practice of intimacy, which both implicates and constitutes time and space, emotions, as well as the body and embodiment of the interacting parties. Co-sleeping allows couples to constitute their pets as ‘kin’ and to blur the boundaries between humans and animals in two distinct ways: (1) by emphasising the personhood of pets and treating them as children or substitute-partners, and (2) by highlighting the animality of humans. This study enhances sociological understanding of the associations between family practices and time and space and sheds light on how family practices create post-human sensory worlds of kinship.
Summary
Few empirical studies have explored the links between sleep and religion and no research has examined how religious individuals view these links. This article contributes to the literature by ...drawing on in‐depth interviews with 31 midlife Israeli Muslims and Jews who describe themselves as religious or very religious. Findings indicate that respondents shared the view that sleep is important for health and wellbeing, as well as for religious practice and the proper worship of God. Their accounts clarified that religious observance entails a set of social rules and prescriptions as well as beliefs that may affect sleep behaviour and sleep outcomes. Traditional prayer times affected sleep duration for observant Muslims and Jews because respondents woke up early for prayer but could not always retire early enough so as to obtain a sufficient amount of sleep. Religion also dictated a preferred sleep position, to which participants became accustomed and found to be helpful. Respondents maintained that their deep faith in God and the practice of praying helped reduce stress, which contributed to sleep quality. However, among Muslims, missing prayers could arouse feelings of guilt and unease, thus affecting sleep quality. The article concludes that religion affects the sleep of both Muslims and Jews, but these effects vary by how individuals practice their religion and by how religiosity intersects with other social categories, such as gender. Future studies could enrich understanding of the social determinants of sleep by designing research inspired by lay persons’ insights into the association between religion and sleep.
Few empirical studies have explored how different types of knowledge are associated with diverse objectivities and moral economies. Here, we examine these associations through an empirical ...investigation of the public policy debate in Israel around medical cannabis (MC), which may be termed a contested medicine because its therapeutic effects, while subjectively felt by users, are not generally recognized by the medical profession. Our findings indicate that beneath the MC debate lie deep-seated issues of epistemology, which are entwined with questions of ethics and morality. Whereas some stakeholder groups viewed evidence-based medicine and mechanical objectivity as the only valid knowledge base, others called for recognition of a particular experience-based knowledge, championing regulatory, administrative, or strong objectivity. Stakeholders’ interpretations of what should be considered as ethical courses of (in)action corresponded to their epistemological views, with most criticizing the regulators for relying on regulatory subjectivity instead of objectivity. Our in-depth mapping of this arena allowed us not only to shed light on the emergence of the new entity called “medical cannabis” but also to reexamine the link between epistemology, ethics, and action and to elucidate how heterogeneous groups view the validity and objectivity of knowledge and the interface between medicine, science, and policy.
The subject of sleep has been receiving increasing attention in multiple arenas over the past decades, including in the social sciences and the media. However, only a few empirical studies have ...investigated how sleep is constructed within and by media discourses, and also whether and how these discourses are gendered. The present article explores how two popular lifestyle magazines, Men's Health and Women's Health, construct sleep. The analysis of online articles reveals that both magazines constitute sleep as a form of body work that enhances bodily capital, but they do so in gendered ways that reinforce patriarchal norms and expectations. This study shows that the magazines' discourse supports the neoliberal project, while also highlighting the malleability and adaptability of neoliberal discourses. The conclusion is that the ways in which the magazines' discourse constructs sleep might deepen both gender and class inequalities.
Although the sociology of sleep is a growing subfield, little is known about agency in the context of sleep. This article contributes to the sociological literature by showing how different types of ...agency emerge as a result of sleep interembodiment (i.e., experiencing sleep partners’ bodies as intertwined). The study draws on qualitative data generated through in‐depth interviews with 70 snorers and 20 sleep partners of snorers. Interviews were conducted in Israel and were analysed following constructivist grounded theory principles. Results indicate that two types of agency coexist and, in fact, co‐constitute one another: The first type, herein termed material agency, reflects the post‐humanist tradition, which conceptualizes agents as entities (whether human or nonhuman) that alter a state of affairs by making a difference in another agent's action. This type of agency exists in both wakefulness and throughout periods of sleep, as the snorer’s body acts and interacts with a partner's body in ways that engender significant change in their lives, relationships, and actions. In contrast, the second type, herein termed reflexive agency, reflects the humanist tradition, which regards agency as individuals' creative and assertive capacities motivated by intentionality and reflexivity. This type of agency declines significantly during stages of deep sleep but re‐emerges in response to partners' actions. The article adds to the literature by refining the concept of agency and elucidating its relationship to both accountability and interembodiment. In addition, the article provides much‐needed empirical evidence showing how “personal responsibility” for health, as required by neoliberal discourses, is invoked within families, specifically with regard to sleep. This study therefore shows how certain macro‐level structures of neoliberalism are enacted and reinforced within micro‐level interactions.
Although researchers, laypersons and policymakers have been debating about the "medicalization of cannabis" for years, few have attempted to unpack this phrase and clarify what it actually means. The ...present qualitative research addresses this issue by tracing the trajectory of "medical cannabis" (MC) in Israel.
This article draws on multiple sources, including in-depth interviews, parliamentary protocols, conference observations, policy documents, and media coverage.
The analysis shows that while patients, growers, and certain physicians advocated for a more inclusive type of cannabis medicalization, other physicians and sick funds strove to curtail this medicalization; for its part, the Ministry of Health (MoH) attempted to find a pathway that would bridge their conflicting standpoints. In the first phase of medicalization patients' and regulators' trajectories coincided; however, they diverged in the second phase as regulators sought to transform MC into a standardized medication in line with the biomedical model. Patients and physicians criticized the new policy reform and highlighted some of its negative effects on patient care. The trajectories of patients and regulators then intersected in a way that led to some alterations in the MC trajectory.
This study enhances our understanding of how MC was, and is still being, incorporated into medicine in Israel. The study illuminates the plurality of meanings that have been assigned to the concept of medicalization and the contingent nature of MC. Additionally, this study sheds light on the under-investigated role of regulators as drivers of the medicalization of "solutions," and it shows how different engines of medicalization may drive the process in diverging directions.
