Minority Bias

It has been known for some time that minorities, in most walks of life, often do not receive their fair share of services. We know that autism appears in nearly the same proportions throughout all races, nationalities and cultures. But in order to receive the diagnosis, one must be identified by some sort of professional. That is typically a physician.

Several studies have reported that Hispanics have a lower incidence of autism than non-Hispanic Caucasians. Most studies that report these results suggest that this is likely due to the fact that most Hispanics studied have lower income levels, and thus cannot afford the health care required for the diagnosis to be made. This makes sense to me. One study, however, looked at 1184 schools in 254 Texas counties, and counted the number of children in kindergarten through 12th grade in each district who had been diagnosed with autism. In this study, socioeconomic status was in fact controlled for, and the researchers still found fewer Hispanic schoolchildren were diagnosed with autism.

What was fascinating in this study, however, was that that for every 10 percent increase in Hispanic children in a district, the prevalence of autism decreased by 11 percent, while the prevalence of children with intellectual or learning disabilities increased by about 10 percent. Interestingly, the reverse pattern was seen among non-Hispanic Caucasian kids. As their percentage of autism in a district increased by 9 percent, the prevalence of intellectual and learning disabilities fell by about 13 percent.
It appears from these results that Hispanic children may, regardless of their socioeconomic status, be seen as learning disabled, cognitively or intellectually lacking (instead of autistic), while the non-Hispanic children were seen instead as having autism.

Is that surprising?