A study by Health & Society scholar Adam Reich was published in the American Journal of Sociology.  The “moralized markets” school within economic sociology has convincingly demonstrated variation in the relationship between economic activity and moral values. Yet this scholarship has not sufficiently explored either the causes of this variation or the consequences of this variation for organizational practice. By examining different moral-market understandings and practices in the context of a single market-based organizational field, this article highlights the contradictory character of processes of commodification, as different historically institutionalized ideas conflict, in different ways, with the market logic that increasingly organizes the field as a whole. The article examines the contradictory commodification of hospital care in three hospitals within one Northern California community.

A study from INCITE's Understanding Autism Project was published in Pediatrics. This study's objective 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.

The study, which examines a large dataset of case load files from the California Department of Developmental Services, found children whose symptoms were least severe at first diagnosis tended to improve more rapidly than those severely affected. One group 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.

The study was co-authored by Christine Fountain, Alix S. Winter, and Peter Bearman.

Click here to read the study.

Click here to read an article about the study in Crain's New York.

In September 2010, the Columbia University H&SS site (a partnership of INCITE and the Mailman School of Public Health) funded the seed grant "Linking spatial and social environment for population health." The study, made possible through the 10-month grant, was featured in the January 2012 Special Issue of Social Networks. The article "Capturing context: Integrating spatial and social network analyses," was co-authored by jimi adams (Cohort 5), Katherine Faust and Gina Lovasi (Cohort 4). Click here to read the article.

Exploring the increasing prevalence of autism, The Los Angeles Times cited Peter Bearman's research into the environmental causes of autism. Bearman's research analyzes state data, finding that children who live near somebody with autism were more likely to have the diagnosis themselves. Bearman estimates that the influence of neighbors alone accounts for 16% of the growth of autism cases in the state developmental system between 2000 and 2005.

NEW YORK, NY-The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced today that Columbia University sociologist Peter Bearman will receive the prestigious NIH Director's Pioneer Award, a $2.5 million award that will support Bearman's study of the social determinants of autism.

The Pioneer Award Program is a high-risk research initiative designed to support individual scientists of exceptional creativity who propose pioneering approaches to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research. This year, this program awarded grants to 12 researchers. NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni will announce the 2007 recipients of the award at the Pioneer Award Symposium in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, September 19.

"The autism epidemic is a huge and complex puzzle which impacts hundreds of thousands of children and families," said Bearman. "It is one of the most pressing population health problems of our time. The Pioneer award makes it possible for us to think new thoughts and take big chances in our understanding of the epidemic and hopefully to make major contributions to public health."

Numerous studies have investigated hundreds of factors believed to be associated with both the incidence and increased prevalence of autism. However, a significant dilemma facing researchers is that no single factor correlates very highly with the developmental disorder.

Peter Bearman's research aims to provide new insight into the increased prevalence of autism by comprehensively and simultaneously examining the major factors potentially driving this epidemic. Bearman's study seeks to identify to what extent each of the three competing theories-expanded criteria for diagnosing autism, environmental degradation, and genetic inheritance-is able to account for the rise in autism cases.

In the first stage of his project, Bearman will build new data sets that enable him to understand potential gene-environment interactions, and assess the impact of changes in diagnostic criteria, family dynamics, and other factors in accounting for the autism epidemic. The second phase of his research will focus on understanding the social networks of doctors, hospitals, schools, and interacting parents in neighborhoods and associations whose activities construct the epidemic as we observe it. The third stage of the project will extend the framework developed for analyzing autism to other non-contagious epidemics, ADD, ADHD and bi-polar disorder which, though biologically unrelated to autism, may share some underlying social dynamics.