An Online Resource For Understanding Disability ‘By The Numbers’

For the last several years there is been a place online where anyone interested can get hard, reliable, revealing data on people with disabilities in the United States. This past March 2022 it got an update.

It’s easy to talk about the supposed size of disability communities and populations — whether they are bigger than people think or smaller than they might want to boast. Everyone has assumptions about what disabled people’s lives are like, and how they must compare to those of people without disabilities. But how does anyone know what they are talking about?

On March 11 and 12, 2022 the University of New Hampshire, Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Disability Statistics and Demographics gave online presentations on the 2021 Annual Report: People with Disabilities In America — a summary of findings in their most recent Annual Disability Statistics Compendium. The compendium and report may be understood as a complete collection of raw numerical charts, and an accompanying shorter selection of charts highlighting some of the Disability Statistics Compendium’s most interesting findings, and tracking them over time. The presentations were free. Video recordings with audio, captions, and Sign Language interpreting are also available to view for free. The project is funded by a grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research.

Solid information about people with disabilities is out there. The problem for users is that it’s hard to find and put together. Project director Andrew Houtenville noted in his presentation that disability statistics are “scattered across multiple sources” and therefore hard to assemble and compare in consistent and meaningful ways. So the purpose of the Disability Statistics Compendium, says Houtenville, is to “bridge the gap between producers and consumers of disability data.”

The compendium and annual report serve a unique and essential purpose. They bring together disability data from across many sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Social Security, and several other data collections. This year, there is also a newly added section on voter registration and voting, incorporating data from help from recent studies by Drs. Lisa Schur and Douglas Kruse of Rutgers University.

The project started with a National Council on Disability recommendation in 2008 for regular reporting on the status of people with disabilities. Annual compendiums are now available going back to 2009.

This year’s compendium update and report were affected by Covid-19. The pandemic stopped all of the Census Bureau’s in-person interviewing, resulting in over 31% fewer interviews overall, in turn affecting data quality. “Experimental weights” used, “with caution,” explained Houtenville. So the most recent data should be understood to be more like estimates, and not strictly compared with prior years’ data. Project staff don’t recommend comparing 2020 with 2019 figures. Their charts show 2020 data figures, but they are not line-linked to 2019.For instance, the most recent figures for mass transit use to get to work are massively lower for both disabled and non-disabled people, compared to previous years. This likely reflects the pandemic itself far more than any long-term trends for people with disabilities, employment, or transit accessibility. And the latest figures for the “Disablement Index” — which is the percentage of disabled people who have difficulty doing errands independently outside the home — are also strongly distorted by the pandemic, which in 2020 at least curtailed everyone’s activities outside the home.

Despite pandemic induced distortions and confusion, recent data highlighted in the annual report and compendium show how this project can shed light and a degree of logic on the complex disability community.

Here are some examples:

  • 13.2% of Americans had some kind of physical or mental disability in 2019. There have been some fluctuations in this figure over the years. But the size of the disability population has been consistently between 12% and 14% since 2008.
  • 38.9% of disabled people worked for pay in 2019, compared to 78.6% of non-disabled people. This large employment gap has widened and narrowed by a few percentage points here and there over time. But employment for disabled and non-disabled people have mostly tracked up and down with the economy. Meanwhile, 25.9% of disabled people lived in poverty in 2019, compared to just 11.4% of non-disabled people. The poverty gap remained about the same over time as well, similarly tracking overall trends in the economy.
  • There are substantial racial and regional disparities among people with disabilities in the U.S. Data clearly show higher rates of disability itself for African-Americans, and lower educational rates, more institutionalization, (especially imprisonment), and higher unemployment and poverty for African-American disabled people compared to these rates for disabled people overall. And there are some significant differences between rural and urban settings, with higher disability prevalence in rural areas, and generally worse outcomes as well in employment, education, and other indicators for people with disabilities living in rural regions.
  • Figures on registration and voting rates were included for the first time. This includes nationwide and state numbers on disabled and non-disabled registration and voting in the 2020 elections, as well as figures on methods of voting, such as traditional on-site polling and voting by mail. There still appears to be a persistent political participation gap between disabled and non-disabled people, though it has been narrowing somewhat.

It’s impossible to draw too many simple conclusions from the Disability Statistics Compendium and the 2021 Annual Report. One thing the data shows clearly is the sheer complexity of disabled people’s lives and trends in the disabled population. However, to both casual observers and experts, one word does suggest itself: consistency.

Across dozens of population, quality of life, and social status measures, gaps between disabled and non-disabled Americans have been broadly consistent over the years. Despite some notable fluctuations, there have been few major setbacks or breakthroughs for disabled people. These reports paint a picture of very gradual progress. They suggest that so far, nobody has found a revolutionary policy or approach to change the basic equations of life for Americans with disabilitie.s

In addition to specific data points and charts, the compendium and annual reports provide two other important things to those who use them:

First, they help people more accurately perceive the size and makeup of the disabled population. They refute the common assumption that disabled people constitute a tiny minority with little importance beyond humanitarian concerns. They flesh out the actual size of the disabled population in numbers and percentages, both nationally and state by state. And they map out the relative sizes of disability sub-populations of people with different types of disabilities — including ambulatory, cognitive, vision, and hearing impairments, as well as disabilities affecting self-care and independent living.

This article was written by Andrew Pulrang a free lance writer for Forbes.com. To continue reading this article please click here.

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