Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Including Group Quarters Residents with Household Residents Can Change What We Know About Working-Age People with Disabilities

Information about residents of institutional and noninstitutional group quarters (GQ), particularly those with disabilities, has been limited by gaps in survey data, and statistics based on data that exclude some or all GQ residents are biased as estimates of total population statistics. We used the 2006 and 2007 American Community Survey (ACS) to identify the distribution of working-age populations with and without disabilities by major residence type, and to assess the sensitivity of disability statistics to GQ residence. Our findings showed that (1) of those with disabilities, about one in 13 males and one in 33 females live in GQ; (2) younger males with disabilities are more likely to reside there, particularly at institutional GQ; (3) individuals with and without disabilities who are black, American Indian, never married, or have less than a high school education had higher GQ residence rates; (4) 40% of male and 62% of female GQ residents have a disability; (5) adding GQ residents to household residents increases estimated disability prevalence for males by 6% and the estimated difference between disability prevalence rates by gender nearly disappears; and (6) inclusion of the GQ population substantively lowers employment rate estimates for males with disabilities—especially young blacks and American Indians

Consumer Voices for Coverage: Advocacy Evaluation Toolkit

Offers step-by-step guidance on evaluating advocacy projects, including developing a logic model, collecting evaluation data, and using focus groups and interviews to evaluate or inform program performance. Includes surveys on RWJF's advocacy initiative

Transforming Coalition Leadership: An Evaluation of a Collaborative Leadership Training Program

Effective coalitions need leaders who are able to reach beyond individual, group, and sectoral boundaries to advance a shared vision for healthy and thriving communities. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation partnered with the Center for Creative Leadership to create a one-year pilot, the Community Coalition Leadership Program, to test a new approach to providing training in collaborative leadership. This article discusses the program, whether and how it improved participants’ individual and coalition leadership skills, and the implications for foundations and other entities seeking to increase interdependent leadership capacity within community coalitions. This article does not, however, intend to describe progress toward coalition goals or changes in community outcomes, given the short time frame of the evaluation. A post-program survey found that most coalitions improved on some measures along four dimensions: membership, structure, functioning, and collaboration. Even coalitions that struggled showed improvement along some dimensions, which suggests that the program was a valuable part of a longer-range strategy to build leadership capacity in under-resourced communities

Closures Are the Tip of the Iceberg: Exploring the Variation in State Vocational Rehabilitation Program Exits After Service Receipt (Abstract)

State vocational rehabilitation (VR) agencies play an important role in promoting employment for people with disabilities. However, little information has been available about how many people with disabilities exit after VR service receipt and how exits vary with individual characteristics and across states compared to the general population with disabilities. We used RSA administrative data from fiscal year 2007 and public use files from the American Community Survey to calculate the ratio of the number of individuals completing VR services to the estimated number of working-age people with disabilities in 2007 at the national and state-levels and for demographic, educational, and disability subgroups. Overall, our results show that 1.3 of every 100 working-age adults with a disability living in the community exited a VR agency after receiving services, with state variation ranging from 0.6 percent in Washington and Puerto Rico to 4.0 percent in Vermont. We also found large differences in these numbers across sex, age, racial, ethnic, and educational groups—differences that are much larger in some states than in others. These observed disparities raise questions about why some groups are more likely to complete VR services than others and whether VR agencies should be systematically targeting more resources to certain groups. Further research and additional data collection strategies are needed to better understand how well people with disabilities complete VR agency services

Capturing the essence of folding and functions of biomolecules using Coarse-Grained Models

The distances over which biological molecules and their complexes can function range from a few nanometres, in the case of folded structures, to millimetres, for example during chromosome organization. Describing phenomena that cover such diverse length, and also time scales, requires models that capture the underlying physics for the particular length scale of interest. Theoretical ideas, in particular, concepts from polymer physics, have guided the development of coarse-grained models to study folding of DNA, RNA, and proteins. More recently, such models and their variants have been applied to the functions of biological nanomachines. Simulations using coarse-grained models are now poised to address a wide range of problems in biology.Comment: 37 pages, 8 figure

Aspects of Religiosity and Their Relationships To Measures of Quality of Life

Program year: 1990/1991Digitized from print original stored in HDRReligion in past research has been found to be a significant predictor of quality of life, but previous measures used do not appear to explore the fullness of either factors of life. Two hundred and twenty two undergraduate students at a southern university were given a 70 item questionnaire measuring 13 religious and 10 quality of life variables. Results from Pearson r correlations, chi square tests of significance, and gamma correlations yielded significance (p(0.05) for many of the relationships. The religious factors found to have the greatest predictive value of quality of life values were religious happiness, spiritual wellbeing, spiritual importance, and religious experience, all of which are meaning, as opposed to belief and belonging, variables. Quality of life measures best predicted by religiosity were general happiness and purpose in life. These results may be confounded by the high relgiosity scores of the sample population

The effects of the Americans with Disabilities Act on the health coverage and post-secondary education of people with disabilities

In 1990, Congress passed the ADA to address many of the larger issues related to discrimination and access that individuals with disabilities face. A rich and varied literature has emerged on the ADA's effects on employment, and this study builds on that literature by focusing on whether the ADA, as an environmental factor, affected the relationship between having an activity limitation and having a participation restriction in either health coverage or post-secondary education. The study uses a difference-in-differences modeling approach to compare outcomes for individuals with and without limitations before and after the ADA was implemented, and also capitalizes on a natural experiment resulting from differences in state laws protecting people with disabilities. The key results are as follows: 1) for the working-age population, individuals with limitations had a shift in their health coverage away from private health insurance (such as from an employer) and toward public coverage (such as Medicaid or Medicare) that was largely related to a rise in federal disability benefits rather than the ADA; 2) full-time workers with limitations (particularly those working for private for-profit firms) had a decline in their employer-based health insurance rates after the ADA was implemented, and the effect was larger in states where the ADA represented an addition to existing state law, which is consistent with the ADA having a perverse effect; and 3) the ADA did not improve post-secondary educational enrollment among individuals with limitations, though younger adults with a high school education had an increase in college enrollment after the ADA was implemented. While the ADA addressed barriers for people with disabilities regarding discrimination and access, it provided no supports to address additional barriers to participation, such as having less education and fewer resources. Future policies to promote the economic independence of people with disabilities should build on the ADA to address such barriers, particularly those regarding financial costs. Two such policies would be to implement broad health care reform (such as implemented in Massachusetts) and provide more post-secondary education funding.Ph.D.Includes abstractVitaIncludes bibliographical referencesby Todd C. Honeycut