Which U.S. Children Are Being Diagnosed and Treated for Disabilities? Population-based Estimates of Health Disparities

Rutgers Global Health Institute is hosting a guest faculty seminar at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, March 16, 2022, as part of its Viewpoints in Global Health Research: Guest Faculty Seminar Series.

This online seminar will be presented by:

Paul Morgan
Center for Educational Disparities Research, Pennsylvania State University

Which U.S. Children Are Being Diagnosed and Treated for Disabilities? Population-based Estimates of Health Disparities
Morgan will examine which U.S. children are more likely to be diagnosed and provided treatments or services for disabilities. He compares children who are observationally similar in order to better evaluate to what extent health disparities may be occurring. Across analyses of 40 population-based samples, he repeatedly finds that children who are white or from English-speaking families are more likely to be diagnosed and to receive treatments or services for disabilities such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, speech or language impairments, and dyslexia or other specific learning disabilities. Morgan also will discuss policy, research, and practice implications of these findings for advancing health equity.

About the Presenter
Paul L. Morgan is the Henry and Marion Eberly Faculty Fellow, a professor of education and demography, and director of the Center for Educational Disparities Research at Pennsylvania State University. His work investigates health and educational disparities during early and middle childhood through analyses of population-based datasets.

Morgan has published 70 studies in peer-reviewed journals including Pediatrics, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, American Journal of Speech Language Pathology, and Journal of Learning Disabilities. His work and findings have been reported on by various national, regional, and local media and cited by the World Bank, the Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. His research has been supported through over $15,000,000 in external funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, and the Spencer Foundation.

Online via Zoom

Free and open to the public. For more information, email info@globalhealth.rutgers.edu. For more events, visit the seminar series page on the Rutgers Global Health Institute website or explore the institute’s full online calendar.