RRTC Research Findings
Speakers: Dr. Katherine Inge & Dr. Carolyn Graham
Transcription provided by: Caption First, Inc.
> DR. KATHERINE INGE: Good afternoon. I hope everyone is doing great this afternoon. It's been a long day but lots of good information floating around. I'm Katherine Inge. I am the Director of the RRTC on people with physical disabilities and I have been very, very, very lucky to have this woman working with me, Dr. Carolyn Graham.
She has expanded my knowledge of research beyond measure, I must say. So we are very fortunate to have her with us and she is going to talk about the national survey that we have conducted with people with physical disabilities. It's the second phase to the research that I was talking about this morning related to the focus groups so I am going to turn it over to Carolyn. Thank you, Carolyn.
> DR. CAROLYN GRAHAM: Well -- it's on. I'm going to talk to you about the preliminary findings of our national survey that we conducted. The part I'm going to be presenting on today is just the preliminary findings of what they want and need. It consists of things that we're going to be talking about are barriers, facilitators and then things they need to know about that they don't know about. And I'll be talking about what they don't know all through it because we did put a response "I don't know" and it was very interesting what they don't know.
So again this is our disclaimer. This was -- the study was funded by the NIDILRR grant for physical disabilities.
And the purpose is to determine if people with physical disabilities report different barriers and facilitators to employment. So we tend to lump all people with physical disabilities together. What type -- what are differences? Are there any other significant differences between the two groups -- between the groups and what they need? And to also determine the information needs related to those employment barriers and facilitators.
Again there's a growing body of knowledge about the barriers of employment we have published on this. And but we don't know much about comparing the disabilities. Dr. Krause did present in the last session about some differences between MS and spinal cord injury.
Part of the goal of this is to provide integrated knowledge translation and taking this information and being able to disseminate it and finding out what the people with physical disabilities need to know and then coming up with a strategy to translate it to them, to transfer that knowledge to them so they can use it.
Again what we did was after the coding we came up with the themes, we all got together on the focus group team and we came up with the questions for the survey. So the questions from the survey came directly from the focus group information. The survey was an online survey. We wanted to obtain data from 100 people with Cerebral Palsy, 100 people with MS and 100 people with spinal cord injury.
We tried other ones like arthritis and other physical disabilities. These three categories were the ones that we had the most people fall into. We had a fourth category that was other physical disabilities just because we didn't have enough to analyze them separately. We might be able to do some smaller analysis of those later but right now these are the three, the major categories.
And again we randomly selected 100 people to get $25 gift certificates as an incentive for them to participate. As you'll notice as we go through the slides, you'll notice that the sample size varies greatly and that's because there was a lot of people skipping questions. We allowed them to do that so for the mean age I think we had probably a total around 355 people who participated and completed the survey to some extent. But here for the mean age you can see only 349 answered this one. The mean age was 43, almost 44 years of age with a standard deviation of 12 years.
Most were employed. We worked really hard to get those unemployed folks to participate but we had some difficulty getting those. Our ages range from 19 to 65. We had a few that were over that that we deleted from our survey because they did not fall into our inclusion criteria.
And so here again are some of the disabilities. There were more females by quite a bit. Race, it was predominantly white and nonHispanic, nonLatino. This is something to note; not only was it primarily a white sample, it was primarily a very educated sample. We really wanted to point this out in light of some of the findings that we're going to talk about. 118 or 33% had a bachelor's degree. 28% had a graduate degree. So I mean this was a very educated group.
Now the income -- you can see that there's a good group that made $60,000 or less but the largest group made between 24 and 36,000.
And here are the disability types. You can see MS, Multiple Sclerosis was the largest. We had 106 participants with Multiple Sclerosis so 40% of our sample had MS. We had 22% being CP and spinal cord injury was 17%. The other ones were other physical disabilities or OPD is what I labeled that and we'll use throughout the presentation was 30% and that included MD , orthopedic impairment, spina bifida, arthritis, amputation, post-polio, post-stroke, TBI and even other so we had another within the other but again it was a great variety.
So even though there is some significant differences having to do with this other group, we really can't say a lot right now because I have not delved into it to do sub-analysis to say well this is why it's driving the data this way but there's got to be a reason. Again, this is just the beginning of the analysis. We have a huge amount of data now. It's real exciting and I want to do this and that.
So this is the age by disability. Those with Cerebral Palsy are the ones that are the youngest and it's a significant difference between the other groups. As you can see the other ones range from 45 to 47.
Here are the demographics on race and it's the same as the overall. It's predominantly white, nonHispanic, nonLatino and predominantly female.
And as you can see, the Cerebral Palsy and the participants with MS are the most educated. A little bit larger than the other groups. Well OPD is pretty high too.
And this is the fall-out for each of the groups as well. The mod for Cerebral Palsy is 12 to 24. The mode for Multiple Sclerosis is 24 to 36. Spinal cord injury is between zero and 24,000 which is similar to what Dr. Krause was finding in his group. And then OPD was 48 to 60,000 so great differences between them.
I did that. What happened?
Education. Oh, this is unemployed. Okay that's why it's different. If we look at dividing them by employment, if they're employed or not, we can still see that those who are employed are higher educated as we would expect. And again we're seeing the same type of trends in sex, race and ethnicity.
Here are the job titles. Katy really wanted me to make sure I brought up the job titles. And these are the top ones right here; coordinator, specialist, manager, staff and executive. We had CEOs, presidents, owners, partners, CFOs and vice-presidents. I mean we had a wide variety of very well successful people with physical disabilities participating in this survey. Again, I have not even gone into analyzing that data by itself but that has to be looked at.
How I came up with these generic names was if they had coordinator in the name that they put in there I put them as a coordinator. If they had specialist, we had job specialist, whatever, they were specialists. Managers. If they were a manager at a retail store or they were a manager in a large organization they were a manager. And the staff were just different assistants and associates and things that would be generally you think of staff.
The educators were anywhere from being professors to teachers, elementary teachers so that was a wide thing but again I was just trying to make meaning out of all of this huge amount of data and a variety of job titles. Analysts, that was financial analysts to policy analysts. Business professionals were accountants, actuary role people, marketers, those types of things. And laborers were baggers or laundry attendants. They would put laborer on there. Yes?
> AUDIENCE: [off microphone]
> DR. CAROLYN GRAHAM: Right. We did not want to limit them to one. And then of course counselors. This goes on and on so we even had physicians, occupational therapists, physical therapists, nurses, attorneys, lawyers and police officers. We had one volunteer receptionist, some researchers, contractors and consultants, advocates. So a variety of types of people were in this group of people. It was very interesting the types of titles they had but again keep in mind this is a very educated, very successful sample that we have here.
So we'll first start off with our barriers. So what we did was this is what we told them. Tell us if the item has been a barrier to your finding and keeping a job. That was what we asked and then we had a list of them and they were to respond don't know, never a barrier, rarely a barrier, often a barrier or always a barrier. Those were the categories.
Now when I did the analysis I talk about the I don't knows separately from the other groups. And when I did chi squares on this and that's just what I started out with because that's where you start when you're doing preliminary analysis, we had violations everywhere and so I went back and combined never and rarely together, and often and always together so we had never a barrier and a barrier, not a barrier and a barrier. That was just because we had to do that for the analysis.
When we're ranking the barriers, I know there's a lot of them, the top barrier that most people said were physical disabilities such as fatigue and mobility and manual dexterity, limited dexterity was the most reported barrier. Unpredictable health then time for personal care, expectations from employers and expectations. You can see there's a wide variety of things how they ranked.
The lowest was reliable personal care assistance. As you would expect for some disabilities that was higher response than others and that's why it's at the low end even though it is an important variable it's low because of the sample.
I don't know if it's a barrier. Seventeen percent said vocational rehabilitation services or the lack of rehabilitation services was a barrier. They didn't know. They didn't know period whether it was or not. They didn't know about. I would almost guess from what I found out when I was doing some of the analysis on the qualitative data that they didn't know where to go or have any idea about vocational rehabilitation services.
In fact, I was in Hawaii these last two weeks and at a luau the woman that sat across from me she was mid-20s and she'd just been diagnosed with MS and she goes well what do I need to do? I said have you ever heard of vocational rehab services? No.
So we have okay -- so on unpredictable health as a barrier, you can see the responses. MS reported more often, a larger percentage of MS. I looked at the percentages. I compared the percentages. A larger percentage of the people with MS reported that unpredictable health was a barrier and it seems common since that Cerebral Palsy would be the one that had the least so that's a common sense thing or it seems to me.
And as far as unemployed, those who were unemployed reported unpredictable health as a barrier. Now we did not ask about severity, which I think would have helped with some of the responses I'm finding in the data.
Physical disabilities as a barrier. Again we're talking about mobility, fatigue, limited manual dexterity. Those with other physical disabilities and those with MS were more likely, a larger percentage, reported this as a barrier. You can see that. CP and spinal cord injury are lower percent. Again, even though those are lower, they're still a barrier for 1/3 or more of the people.
As far as physical disabilities as a barrier for employment status again unemployed. Almost all of them unemployed are what happened here.
Time needed to meet personal care. There was no differences by disability status and here again unemployed reported this more often than employed but not so much. Again this has to do with the fact that we're not dividing. I didn't do a sub-analysis of the unemployed to see what disability type. I think that's the next step to go to find out what's going on there.
Here we looked at employer or coworker’s expectations concerns respondent's ability to work. There was no significant differences between disability types but as you can see even though there's no difference between the groups they're all pretty high. We're talking about 70% or higher across all of them, 69 is the lowest but still even though there's no difference there's a huge amount that are having problems with this. Then we have unemployed again having problems with employer coworker expectations. On this one it was more that on your last job what was your experience, correct Patty?
Attitudes of service providers. Again there was no significant difference between the groups. That one has really scratched my head because there isn't quite a bit of variance in there and I'm not sure what's going on. I need to do further analysis on that to find out why that was not significant. And employment again, unemployed is much higher as far as attitudes of service providers being a barrier.
Access to flexible work schedules including telework. There was no difference within disability types here but again unemployed had a huge -- it was very high, 85%.
Am I going too fast? I've got tons of these things. Willingness to employers to modify job duties such as eliminating tasks. Again no difference between the disability types. All of them are high again. All of them are extremely high, over 50%. And employment status again unemployed still has a huge problem with this even though employed there's almost half. Yes?