Cornell's EDI 2008 Disability Status Report Webinar: A Review

Today, I watched a webinar presented by the Employment and Disability Institute (EDI) within the ILR School (formerly the School of Industrial and Labor Relations) at Cornell University.  Elsewhere, I have outlined some of the materials available on EDI's website generally.  Among those materials, it may be worth noting that EDI occasionally offers other webinars.  EDI maintains a Current News Bulletin webpage (also available in PDF and via RSS feed) that provides notifications of those webinars as well as notices of other disability-related developments; that webpage (or PDF or RSS) appears to be the best way of keeping up with such events. (The news bulletin appears to be produced by the DBTAC for the northeastern region (as distinct from the New England region), which in turn appears to be hosted by ILR.)

Today's webinar was described as "DisabilityStatistics.org Presents: The 2008 Disability Status Report."  The slides used in this webinar are presently available for PDF download.  As those slides indicate, the webinar amounted to a simple presentation of information that already seems to appear in EDI's Disability Status Reports.  It was, in other words, a video of a series of slides with voice-overs.


No doubt this presentation was exactly what some viewers needed:  it provided a summary of the printed data, in a format that some may find more accessible or interesting.  I also appreciate that, just as Cornell provides an essentially neutral home for other governmental materials, such as the United States Code, so also EDI may see its role in this regard as one of simply serving as a mouthpiece for the government.  But I was disappointed.  I hoped to hear the inside dope.  I didn’t want to just hear, without elaboration, that the 2008 ACS asked significantly different questions than previous years’ surveys, and that the resulting data are therefore not directly comparable to previous years’ results.  I already knew that; my previous post says so.  I wanted to hear why.

I wanted to hear, for example, that my own previous post was correct in its hunch that the data collection process was deliberately corrupted by the Bush Administration, in ways that no self-respecting statistician of disabilities can tolerate.  Or, alternately, I wanted to hear that, no, there were in fact very good reasons, beyond those I already surmised, for eviscerating year-to-year comparability.  I did not want to hear someone simply parrot the fact that, because of said evisceration, the loss of millions of Americans from the lists of the disabled did not mean that those people had actually ceased to have disabilities.  I wanted to hear that statisticians are taking countermeasures, in a bid to develop an approach that will give us an actual, halfway meaningful statistic on the prevalence of disabilities, and on other disability-related matters that the ACS should be covering.

Cornell ILR EDI 2008 Disability Status Reports

The Employment and Disability Institute (EDI) within the ILR School at Cornell University has now rolled out its Disability Status Reports on the American Community Survey (ACS) data for 2008.  These reports are available in PDF format for each state and also for the U.S. a whole.  Based on a review of a few such reports, it appears that each is a 65-page document covering the same list of topics, as presented in each report's list of contents.  (Note that the contents list items are clickable; for example, clicking on the line for "Prevalence:  All Ages" takes you immediately to page 10 of the report.)  Those topics are presented under two main headings, as follows:


Demographics
Prevalence: All Ages
Prevalence: Ages 4 and under
Prevalence: Ages 5 to 15
Prevalence: Ages 16 to 20
Prevalence: Ages 21 to 64 (Working-Age)
Prevalence: Ages 65 to 74
Prevalence: Ages 75 and Older
Prevalence: Gender and Age
Prevalence: Hispanic / Latino Origin and Age
Prevalence: Race

Outcomes
Employment
Not Working but Actively Looking for Work
Full-Time / Full-Year Employment
Annual Earnings (Full-Time / Full-Year workers)
Annual Household Income
Poverty
Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
Education: High School Diploma / Equivalent
Education: Some College / Associate's Degree
Education: Bachelor's Degree or More
Veterans Service-Connected Disability
Health Insurance Coverage
Type of Health Insurance Coverage


For example, the Employment section appears on pp. 32-33, apparently using virtually identical text and identically formatted graphs in each report, so that the first bulleted point on page 32 reads as follows in, say, the Michigan report.  I offer editorial comments on these reports in a contemporaneous post.

In 2008, the employment rate of working-age people with disabilities in MI was 33.6 percent.

whereas the Indiana report differs only by ending that first bulleted point with the words “in IN was 39.8 percent.”  In short, the reports provide a state-by-state, plain-English summary of key points that one will hopefully soon be able to obtain directly from the Census Bureau’s American FactFinder webpage for disability statistics.  (Note that EDI’s Disability Statistics webpage also links to disability data from the decennial Census and the Current Population Survey (CPS).

Browsing the Cornell University Disability Statistics Website

I wanted to know how many people with disabilities there were in a particular county in the U.S.  I decided to try to answer this on the basis of materials available at Cornell's Disability Statistics webpage.  I hadn't used that webpage previously, but I guessed it would probably have links, at least, to the main sources of data on the numbers of people with disabilities on federal, state, and local levels in the U.S.  In my initial looks at the webpage, I found its layout somewhat confusing.  There also seemed to be quite a bit of material there.  I decided to summarize what I found, for future reference.

The website required me to log in to view its statistics page, so I did.  I wondered where I was, in the grand scheme of things, so I backed out to the main page of the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR).  Its research webpage led me to its Digital Commons, which led to its list of research units, which led to its Employment and Disability Institute (EDI), whose collection included a large number of manuscripts from recent years.  This was a bit overwhelming, so I backed up one or two steps and took a slightly different path through the EDI's webpage to its Research page and its Publications page.  The latter looked promising:  it sorted EDI publications into seven areas of expertise, each with its own webpage:  ADA, Accommodation & Accessible IT; Community Inclusion; Disability Benefits and Work; Disability Employment Research; Disability Statistics Research; Educational Achievement & Transition; and International Disability Research.  The Disability Statistics Research link under Publications actually just produced what appeared to be the results of an automatic search.

I went back to the EDI homepage.  This time, I explored the links under the Our Areas of Expertise & Projects heading.  These included ediONLINE; ADA, Accommodation & Accessible IT; Community Inclusion; Disability Benefits and Work; Disability Employment Research; Disability Statistics Research; Educational Achievement & Transition; International Disability Research; and Workforce Development.  Here, the Disability Statistics Research link led, reasonably enough, to the Disability Statistics Research homepage.  It looked like one of those that I had seen before, when I was doing my initial poking around (above).  The main current project shown here was the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Disability Demographics and Statistics (StatsRRTC), whose purpose was to bridge the divide between the sources of disability data and the users of disability statistics.  This project's homepage pointed to a list of events, such as a free webinar reviewing a statistics report.  I clicked on one of those events, entitled Discovering Untapped Talent for the Workforce of Tomorrow: Strategies for Employing People with Disabilities.  I was hoping it would lead me to sources of information on the topic, but it appeared to be intended just to notify people of seminars that they would typically have to attend in person.

I backed up a step and tried the Resources page instead of Publications.  This opened up links to the Benequal Organization Assessment webpage; the Disability Medicare Wizard webpage; the Disability Statistics page; the Human Resources (HR) Americans with Disabilities Act Tips page; a Disability Policy Primer; the website of the Longitudinal Study of the Vocational Rehabilitation Services Program; the Northeast ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] & AIT [Accessible Information Technology] Center; the website for the Plan to Achieve Self-Support (PASS) program; the Person Centered Planning Education Site; the TransQUAL Online website; and the Universal Access New York website.

From those choices, I went into the Disability Statistics page.  I looked through its Statistics and Data Sources pages, but then decided that its FAQs page looked most promising.  There, I gravitated toward its list of Disability Data Source User Guides, with links to the Guide to Disability Statistics from the American Community Survey (ACS) (Weathers, 2005); the Guide to Disability Statistics from the Current Population Survey (CPS) - Annual Social and Economic Supplement (Burkhauser & Houtenville, 2006); the Guide to Disability Statistics from the 2000 Decennial Census (Erickson & Houtenville, 2005); the Guide to Disability Statistics from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) Harris, Hendershot, & Stapleton, 2005); the Guide to Disability Statistics from National Health Interview Survey – Disability Supplement (Maag, 2006); the Guide to Disability Statistics from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) (Burkhauser, Weathers, & Schroeder, 2006); and the Guide to Disability Statistics from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) (Wittenburg & Nelson, 2006).

To choose among those user guides, I looked at the FAQ that indicated which data sources would be most appropriate for various purposes.  That FAQ indicated that the ACS was best for current data on disabilities, but also that data below the state level would be reported only in the 2000 Census.  Looking at Weathers (2005, p. 3), however, I found that the ACS was supposed to provide data at the county and Metropolitan Statistical Area levels as well.  I obtained some additional confirmation of that by going to the Census Bureau's American FactFinder page, using its Get Data link under the ACS heading, and observing that it did offer data from the 2006-2008 American Community Survey 3-Year Estimates.  According to the About This Data Set link for that particular three-year estimate, however, data on disabilities were not included.  Instead, the 2008 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates provided the most recent data set offering estimates on disabilities.  (One-year estimates were available only for local units of population > 65,000, as distinct from the lower limit of a population > 20,000 applicable to the three-year estimates.)  For actual findings, as distinct from estimates, the most recent survey with data on disabilities was the 2006 American Community Survey, with an accompanying 2006 Quick Guide ("quick" meaning a PDF of only 50 pages).

This look through the Cornell Disability Statistics website suggested that the site provided informative access to a variety of helpful materials, and that the ACS in particular would tend to be the starting point for my work in reaching specific numbers about persons with disabilities in a particular county.  The next step in my inquiry was to try to put some of those materials to use in reaching actual numbers.