The signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act on July 26, 1990 represented a major
milestone. The law guaranteed equal opportunity for people with disabilities in
public accommodations, commercial facilities, employment, transportation, state
and local government services and telecommunications.
A common question, however, that still pops up during
discussions of disability policy is, “How many people with disabilities are
there in the United States
Coinciding
with the 22nd anniversary of the ADA
The report showed the number of people with disabilities
increasing over the previous five years to 56.7 million people in 2010 (54.4
million in 2005), while the proportion of the population with a disability
remaining unchanged at 18.7 percent of the civilian noninstitutionalized
population.
The Americans With Disabilities:
2010 report also
shows the prevalence of specific disability types. For instance, about 8
million adults had difficulty seeing; 9 million adults had difficulty with an
activity of daily living (ADL); and 4 million adults had a learning
disability. Furthermore, disability is often co-occurring with around 11
million individuals experiencing both physical and mental disabilities.
Measuring
disability in surveys, however, is not an easy task and different surveys can
generate very different estimates of the size of this population. “With a
disability” in one study may not be the same as “with a disability” in
another. Depending on the definition used, the context of the questions or
methods in which the data are collected, estimates of the size of the
population with disabilities have ranged from 22 million (from the American
Housing Survey) to 62 million (from the National
Health Interview Survey).
The
Census Bureau report’s estimate of 56.7 million people with disabilities come
from the Survey
of Income and Program Participation(SIPP), which uses a
comprehensive set of disability questions assessing difficulty on a number of
dimensions including communication, physical and mental functions.
Disability
statistics from this survey are used by agencies — such as the Social Security Administration, Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services and the Administration on Aging — to assist with program planning and
management. The SIPP measure has been the primary statistic for estimating the
size of the population with disabilities since the early 1990s.
Disability and functioning are continuums
ranging from “able to do most or all basic activities with little or no
difficulty or help from technology or another person” to “completely unable to
do most or all basic activities, even with assistive technology or other aids.”
Under this gradient, most people fall somewhere in between. We use categories
like “with a disability” and “with no disability” to make it easier to describe
the population, even though the threshold for how much difficulty constitutes a
disability may not be clear.
Perhaps
some of the difficulty in defining disability along this continuum is also
found in the issue of choosing which activities should be included in the
disability measure. The American
Community Survey (ACS)
– a great survey for looking at the social, economic and housing
characteristics of subnational geographies like states, counties and
metropolitan areas – uses questions on six specific types of disability. With
fewer dimensions of disability, the ACS shows a smaller number of people with
disabilities (36 million, or 12 percent), but provides statistics at more
localized levels.
Researchers,
advocates and policymakers should be aware of the reasons for the different
estimates of the number of people with disabilities in the U.S.
Entradas
