WHAT'S KNOWN ON THIS SUBJECT: Autism is widely considered a heterogeneous disorder in terms of etiology and phenotype. Although autism is usually a lifelong disorder, little is known about the rate or timing of how children develop regarding their communication and social functioning. WHAT THIS STUDY ADDS:Utilizing annual evaluations for a large population of children with autism, we describe the 6 most common trajectories from diagnosis through age 14 years. Trajectories revealed considerable variation, and high socioeconomic status children were more likely to experience rapid improvement.abstract OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study was to describe the typical longitudinal developmental trajectories of social and communication functioning in children with autism and to determine the correlates of these trajectories. METHODS:Children with autism who were born in California from 1992 through 2001 and enrolled with the California Department of Developmental Services were identified. Subjects with ,4 evaluations present in the database were excluded, resulting in a sample of 6975 children aged 2 to 14 years. Score sequences were constructed based on 9 evaluative items for social, communication, and repetitive behavior functioning. Typical trajectories were identified by using group-based latent trajectory modeling, and multinomial logistic regression models were used to determine the odds of classification within each trajectory varied by individual and family-level factors.RESULTS: Six typical patterns of social, communication, and repetitive behavior functioning were identified. These trajectories displayed significant heterogeneity in developmental pathways, and children whose symptoms were least severe at first diagnosis tended to improve more rapidly than those severely affected. One group of ∼10% of children experienced rapid gains, moving from severely affected to high functioning. Socioeconomic factors were correlated with trajectory outcomes; children with non-Hispanic, white, well-educated mothers were more likely to be high functioning, and minority children with less-educated mothers or intellectual disabilities were very unlikely to experience rapid gains.CONCLUSIONS: Children with autism have heterogeneous developmental pathways. One group of children evidenced remarkable developmental change over time. Understanding what drives these outcomes is thus critical.

In this article, we review evidence from the social and medical sciences on the causes and effects of lead exposure. We argue that lead exposure is an important subject for sociological analysis because it is socially stratified and has important social consequences-consequences that themselves depend in part on children's social environments. We present a model of environmental inequality over the life course to guide an agenda for future research. We conclude with a call for deeper exchange between urban sociology, environmental sociology, and public health, and for more collaboration between scholars and local communities in the pursuit of independent science for the common good. 263 Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2018.44:263-282. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by University of California -Berkeley on 08/01/18. For personal use only.

Researchers have theorized how judges’ decision‐making may result in the disproportionate presence of Blacks and Latinos in the criminal justice system. Yet, we have little evidence about how judges make sense of these disparities and what, if anything, they do to address them. By drawing on 59 interviews with state judges in a Northeastern state, we describe, and trace the implications of, judges’ understandings of racial disparities at arraignment, plea hearings, jury selection, and sentencing. Most judges in our sample attribute disparities, in part, to differential treatment by themselves and/or other criminal justice officials, whereas some judges attribute disparities only to the disparate impact of poverty and differences in offending rates. To address disparities, judges report employing two categories of strategies: noninterventionist and interventionist. Noninterventionist strategies concern only a judge's own differential treatment, whereas interventionist strategies concern other actors’ possible differential treatment, as well as the disparate impact of poverty and facially neutral laws. We reveal how the use of noninterventionist strategies by most judges unintentionally reproduces disparities. Through our examination of judges’ understandings of racial disparities throughout the court process, we enhance understandings of American racial inequality and theorize a situational approach to decision‐making in organizational contexts.

This paper examines the racial ecology of lead exposure as a form of environmental inequity, one with both historical and contemporary significance. Drawing on comprehensive data from over one million blood tests administered to Chicago children from 1995-2013 and matched to over 2300 geographic block groups, we address two major questions: (1) What is the nature of the relationship between neighborhood-level racial composition and variability in children's elevated lead prevalence levels? And (2) what is the nature of the relationship between neighborhood-level racial composition and rates of change in children's prevalence levels over time within neighborhoods? We further assess an array of structural explanations for observed racial disparities, including socioeconomic status, type and age of housing, proximity to freeways and smelting plants, and systematic observations of housing decay and neighborhood disorder. Overall, our theoretical framework posits lead toxicity as a major environmental pathway through which racial segregation has contributed to the legacy of Black disadvantage in the United States. Our findings support this hypothesis and show alarming racial disparities in toxic exposure, even after accounting for possible structural explanations. At the same time, however, our longitudinal results show the power of public health policies to reduce racial inequities.

Exposure to dangerous levels of lead was extensive for long stretches of the twentieth century (Feigenbaum and Muller, 2016;Troesken, 2006). Although environmental reforms such as the bans on lead in gasoline and paint in the 1970s were deemed victories for public health at the time (Markowitz and Rosner, 2013;Needleman, 2004), lead toxicity is far from a hazard of the past. High levels of lead have recently been found in thousands of cities in the United States (Pell and Schneyer, 2016) and in both developed and developing countries around the world (Tong, von Schirnding, and Prapamontol, 2000).