The authors will make all data presented in this paper available upon request. The paper was funded under a grant from the Department of Education, National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) to Cornell University. The opinions and conclusions are solely those of the authors and should not be construed as representing the opinions or policy of any agency of the Federal Government or the Urban Institute. The authors thank Richard Burkhauser (Cornell University Department of Policy Analysis and Management, College of Human Ecology), Susanne Bruyere and Andrew Houtenville (Cornell University Program on Employment and Disability, School of Industrial and Labor Relations) and Pamela Loprest (Urban Institute) for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper and Thomas Palumbo (Census Bureau) for his technical assistance using the SIPP data.
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Introduction
Over the past several years, policy makers have recognized the importance of expanding employment opportunities and eliminating barriers to gaining employment for people with disabilities. These ideals are embodied in several important pieces of disability legislation, including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and the newly enacted New Freedom Initiative and the Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act. These initiatives not only represent important disability policy changes but also a fundamental recognition of the importance of work for people with disabilities.
Concurrent with these changes, several recent studies have shown a decline in employment among various groups of people with disabilities over the past decade (DeLeire 2000; Burkhauser, et al. 2002). These trends are surprising given the improvement in employment and economic status of nearly every other demographic and socio-economic group during the mid-nineties. Researchers are divided on the specific factors that are influencing these trends, though there is a general agreement that these empirical findings suggest a disturbing trend given the emphasis on promoting employment among people with disabilities.1
Some researchers, however, have questioned these findings by suggesting that current data sources did not include enough reliable information to adequately capture a credible population of people with disabilities (National Council on Disability 2002; Hale 2001). In fact, these studies suggest that analyses of employment trends among people with disabilities should cease until a more reliable measure of disability status can be developed in future surveys.
The purpose of our analysis is to address these data criticisms and to examine whether information from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) could be used to track employment trends of people with disabilities. Our choice to use the SIPP is important because these data have been used extensively in previous disability analyses and have been subject to much of the criticism by those who are skeptical of the employment trend findings.
Our findings illustrate the importance of exercising caution when measuring disability trends. We show that a major issue in using variables from the SIPP to measure disability status, particularly for trend analyses, is selecting comparable interviews across panels. While we find several comparability problems across panels that are consistent with some data criticisms, we show that some disability definitions can be used to examine important prevalence and employment trends. We conclude that the different empirical results found by researchers are not caused by "problems" with the data but rather with the assumptions researchers make when using the data.
Our findings also have broad implications for collecting data on health related questions, particularly in a longitudinal survey. We show that even relatively minor changes in a questionnaire can affect the way respondents answer specific questions. It will be important for agencies that collect these types of data, especially the Census Bureau, to recognize these changes and their potential consequences for examining trends when designing future questionnaires.
We begin our analysis by presenting a description of some of the more prominent criticisms of the data. Next, we provide a data description of the SIPP, including changes to the 1996 questionnaire, and review the current literature regarding employment trends using these data. We then analyze prevalence and employment rates for people with work limitations and compare these estimates with those from other definitions of disability. Our findings address each of the major criticisms associated with the data and include new analyses of disability trends unavailable in other data sources. We conclude with a summary of our findings and recommendations for using the SIPP in future research.
Notes from this Section
1. Burkhauser and Stapleton (forthcoming) summarized several potential factors that other studies have identified as possible contributors, including the implementation of the ADA, rising health care costs, diminishing overall health of the population, and changes in the characteristics of the population (e.g., aging). The evidence on the effect of the ADA on employment has been mixed. Kruse and Schur (2003) find zero or positive effects, whereas Acemouglu and Angrist (2001) and DeLeire (2000) find negative effects.
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