It is difficult to conclude whether there are any associations between sleep, noise pollution, and other social determinant of sleep following this analysis.

It appears that certain neighborhood conditions (such as a youth’s level of satisfaction with a neighborhood) are associated with sleep problems, but it is not possible with the data at hand to untangle the specificities of those associations.

In order to untangle the relationship between noise levels and sleep, one must look to the individual scale. Without access to data at a finer spatial scale, e.g., at the level of the BSU, it is difficult to comment on noise and sleep, given that both are likely to vary within the spatial units used in this analysis. MAUP is thus a significant issue in this analysis.

There is, moreover, a level of error introduced by the inconsistent temporal scale. Due to covid-19, survey data was not collected for 2020, and some socioeconomic variables are yet to be published for 2021. The noise pollution data was from 2016, and improvement to noise pollution may have taken place since then.

Future studies could consider combining advanced models for determining household-level exposure to traffic noise (Bendtsen, 1999) with regression analyses to better understand the spatial nature of sound pollution in relation to the population in cities.

While this study has not been able to determine if noise pollution disturbs sleep among youth in Oslo, the evidence from the literature is sound. With finer spatial and demographic data, the results of this study could have been improved.

Nevertheless, there are clear distinct spatial patterns to both sleep problems and noise pollution in Oslo, and the causes of these could benefit from further exploration.

 

Next: references