ScienceDaily (Apr. 6, 2011) — While there is an increasing equality in terms of the likelihood that children from communities and families across the socioeconomic spectrum will be diagnosed with autism, a new study finds that such factors still influence the chance of an autism diagnosis, though to a much lesser extent than they did at the height of rising prevalence.
"As knowledge has spread about autism, information is now more evenly distributed across different kinds of communities," said Peter S. Bearman, the Cole Professor of the Social Sciences at Columbia University and the Director of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, who coauthored the study, which appears in the April issue of the American Sociological Review. "It is also easier to find someone who can diagnose autism, so we no longer see these huge differences in rates of diagnosis. However, it appears that poor kids living in poor neighborhoods still are not being diagnosed."
The study examines birth and diagnostic records for all children born in California between 1992 and 2000 in conjunction with individual and community-level data such as parental wealth, parental education, and neighborhood property value. All children were followed from the time of birth until June 2006 to allow ample time for diagnosis. As the disorder became increasingly well-known, the average age of autism diagnosis fell from 5.9 among those children born in 1992 to 3.8 for those born in 2000.
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