The Social Gradients of Autism Spectrum Disorders in England

Alexander Upfill-Brown, University of Oxford
Tak Wing Chan, University of Oxford

In this paper, we use administrative data to explore the social gradients of Autism Spectum Disorders (ASD) in England. We report some demographic correlates with ASD that are consistent with previous research. But we also report results that are quite different from those based on Californian data. In particular, we show that in England pupils from lower income households are more likely to be diagnosed with ASD. This raises some questions about how the health delivery and school systems of different countries might produce different social gradients of ASD, an hypothesis which we will explore with multilevel models in the full version of this paper.