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Academic outcomes for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remain poor, especially in the area of reading, in particular, reading comprehension. In recent years, researchers have begun to investigate subcomponent skills of reading comprehension for children with ASD in order to better understand its development and potential interventions to enhance outcomes. This chapter highlights the current knowledge in the field in regards to the key cognitive and language skills associated with reading development for individuals with ASD. These include emergent-literacy skills, word-reading and decoding, reading fluency, oral language, and social cognition. Additionally, the chapter makes suggestions for future research in this area, in particular the need to conduct research to establish evidence-based practices to better support the syndrome-specific reading needs for this population.

This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.

Over 600,000 people are released from federal and state prisons each year, up from about 160,000 in 1980. As such, the reentry literature is framed around these individuals and the personal barriers to reintegration they face. Less work, however, explicitly investigates the role reentry professionals and organizations play in actively shaping the reentry terrain. Using ethnographic observations, document analysis, and interviews with both criminal justice professionals and ex-prisoners, this chapter examines how an organizational field constructs reentry as a racially colorblind process. Although race and racism shape criminal justice, labor market, and other institutional experiences, I find that the positioning of reentry as meritocracy operates to both explain and justify the inequalities experienced by ex-prisoners.

Theories in the justice area have proliferated with little regard either to their interconnections or to the general scientific criterion of parsimony. Recently, there have been several attempts to integrate justice theories. However, there has been practically no discussion of theoretical method, that is, precisely what it means to integrate two or more theories and what must be done to accomplish it. This chapter advocates building integrated theories by developing smaller modularized theories that can be formulated and assembled for multiple purposes. To illustrate the process, we construct five modules addressing different areas connected to justice issues and show how they may be combined into a single integrated structure.

Despite a legacy of research that emphasizes contradictions and their role in explaining change, less is understood about their character or the mechanisms that support them. This gap is especially problematic when making causal claims about the sources of institutional change and our overall conceptions of how institutions matter in social meanings and organizational practices. If we treat contradictions as a persistent societal feature, then a primary analytic task is to distinguish their prevalence from their effects. We address this gap in the context of US electoral discourse and education through an analysis of presidential platforms. We ask how contradictions take hold, persist, and might be observed prior to, or independently of, their strategic use. Through a novel combination of content analysis and computational linguistics, we observe contradictions in qualitative differences in form and quantitative differences in degree. Whereas much work predicts that ideologies produce contradictions between groups, our analysis demonstrates that they actually support convergence in meaning between groups while promoting contradiction within groups.

The purpose of this study is to examine Latino adolescents’ perceptions of the effects of religion on family relationships in the context of intersecting variables of influence such as assimilation, family structure, and migration.

Consistent with the ecological and acculturation frameworks, this qualitative, exploratory study uses directed content analysis to analyze responses from 37 religiously diverse Latino adolescents to open-ended, semi-structured questions from the National Study of Youth and Religion to explore religious influence.

Results suggest that Latino adolescents feel that religion impacts family relationships, with higher degrees of positive religious influence expressed by Baptists and Latino males. Christians (various denominations) were more likely to report that religion affected family relationships than Catholics. All participants who stated that religion exerted a negative influence came from nontraditional families. Youths of Central/South American and Puerto Rican descent were more likely to report that religion affected family relationships positively than were Mexican adolescents. Overall, Latinas girls were more likely to have strong opinions about religion and family relationships than Latino males. Results also suggest an intersection between the Latino cultural values of respeto and marianismo with religion.

Although this study is exploratory and the sample was diverse, the results are not generalizable.

This study provides a sociological lens to the experiences of a rapidly changing and growing demographic in the United States – Latinos. These findings would be of importance to those who are interested in supporting Latino families and facilitating positive adolescent outcomes.