Browsing by Author "Davyt Colo, Joselina Beatriz"
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Item The Cost of Being “Late”: Tracing Misalignment and Misdiagnosis Through Relational Architectures(Universidad del Desarrollo. Facultad de Gobierno, 2026) Davyt Colo, Joselina Beatriz; Candia Vallejos, Cristian; Soto-Icaza, PatriciaThe main focus of this thesis is the investigation of the structural origins of temporal disadvantage, manifested as reduced academic persistence and diagnostic delay, across two distinct domains: higher education and clinical diagnosis. Adopting a Computational Social Science framework, we employ network analysis not merely as a tool, but as a theoretical lens to visualize and quantify the relational architectures that generate structural misalignment between individuals and institutions. The first study examines informational inequality in higher education. Using administrative data from 1.6 million applicants in Chile and replicating findings in Portugal, we construct a network of degree preferences to quantify Preference Misalignment—the distance between a student’s true interests and their enrolled program. We demonstrate that this topological distance is a robust predictor of first-year retention: students with misaligned preferences face a significantly higher risk of persistency, a penalty that remains even among high-performing students. The second study addresses recognitional inequality in autism. Analyzing a clinical sample of autistic children without intellectual disability, we integrate bipartite and multilayer networks to decode the mechanisms behind the diagnostic delay in autistic girls (averaging two years later than autistic boys). We identify while structural connectivity (i.e., high betweenness and participation coefficient) accelerates diagnosis in boys, it significantly delays it in girls. Conversely, phenotypic entropy (systemic disorder) facilitates recognition in females. Multilayer analysis further revealed that autistic girls exhibit a differentiated physiological and cognitive architecture, in which high cognitive ability is structurally coupled with increased psychological burden. Together, these findings reveal that being "late" is rarely an individual accident, but a consequence of institutional architectures that render certain profiles illegible. By mapping these invisible structures, this work provides empirical evidence for policy interventions aimed at reducing the structural friction that generates inequality.