Doctoral Dissertation Research: Disability, Labor Force Participation, and Economic Survival

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

SES-1003003 Dennis Hogan Julia Drew Brown University Over the past 40 years, the status of people with disabilities in the U.S. has changed dramatically. Many state institutions housing people with disabilities have been dismantled and several important pieces of civil rights legislation have passed, mandating the inclusion of people with disabilities in schools and workplaces. Civil rights legislation targeting people with disabilities has had some success: More people with disabilities live in the community than ever before, and certain indicators of their social wellbeing show promising growth. In particular, the share of people with disabilities attaining any college education doubled between 1980 and 2000. Despite these gains, however, a troubling trend has surfaced. People with disabilities were more likely to be employed 20 years ago than they were 10 years ago, and they are even less likely to be employed today. Although macro-level forces like the 2008-09 recession are surely implicated, even times of widespread economic prosperity - like the mid- to late-1990s ? saw sharply declining employment among people with disabilities. How can this be? This project asks: 1) why is there such low employment among people with disabilities and why is it getting worse while educational attainment, the primary predictor of employment, is getting better; 2) who comprises the minority of people with disabilities that work and what seems to explain their relative success; 3) what circumstances surround work entrances and exits; 4) what effects does such widespread unemployment have on the lives of people with disabilities; and 5) what does the unemployed majority do to accomplish economic survival? This project contributes to mesolevel sociological theories of disability by explaining how long-run changes in institutional constraints and opportunities have affected the employment and educational experiences of people with disabilities. This project answers these questions through a combination of qualitative methods and quantitative methods. Qualitative methods include in-depth interviews with people with disabilities living in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, participant observation, and analysis of textual materials. Quantitative methods include multivariate mixed effects and event history analyses of the 1969-2008 National Health Interview Surveys and the 1996-2004 Surveys of Income and Program Participation, respectively. Broader Impacts. This project contributes to the goals outlined by the 2006 U.N. international convention on the rights of people with disabilities by examining why Americans with disabilities experience such severe and persistent levels of unemployment, and the consequences it has for their day-to-day lives. Findings will inform public policies to advance the inclusion of people with disabilities into U.S. society. Project findings will also provide generalizable understandings of why public policies designed to improve the lives of marginalized citizens fail. Last, this project contributes significantly to the interdisciplinary literature on work and disability, in which sociological perspectives have been absent.