== Site Navigation ==

Main Page Past Shows About Us Show Hosts Comment

== Project Sites ==

Disability Law Lowdown Podcast Disability Law Lowdown Podcast
en Espanol
Disability Law Lowdown Podcast
in ASL Southwest ADA Podcast

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

[ Listen | Download | Transcript | Printer Friendly Version (New window) ]

Disability Law Lowdown Show #29

[music plays]

Hello and welcome to the Disability Law Lowdown podcast. My name is Beth Case and I am the producer and editor of all three of the Disability Law Lowdown podcasts. You don’t get to hear my voice very often. I’m the one at the beginning that tells you the show number, but today I’m here to tell you about this upcoming show.

Jana Copeland submitted a fantastic episode for the Disability Law Lowdown. Unfortunately, it was at least twice as long as our normal shows. So rather than give you just one really long show, because there’s such good information here and I want to make sure you listen to everything, we’re splitting this episode into two parts. So you will get the show you’re listening to right now and in two weeks part two will be available. So I hope you enjoy it.

[music plays]

Jana Copeland: Hello, coming to you live from Colorado Springs, Colorado, headquarters for the DBTAC Rocky Mountain ADA Center. It’s good to be back on the Disability Law Lowdown.

Today it’s my pleasure to talk with you a little bit about some of the exciting opportunities that the DBTACs have involving research projects involving a variety of topics including ADA implementation, employment of people with disabilities and other areas including community participation.

Today, what I’d like to do is talk to you about some of the different studies that the different regions are doing as well as have the opportunity to talk with a couple of my research colleagues in Regions Four and Six about how you, Disability Law Lowdown audience members, can get involved in the DBTAC research program.

In this last research cycle for the ADA Centers, we have the opportunity to participate in and design research projects that are relevant to folks working with the ADA Centers. And in that effort all of the regions have a variety of projects that we’re working on, but several have the opportunity for individuals who listen to the podcast to get involved and have their voices heard in a variety of areas.

Our goal is to involve our stake holders in as much as possible, so this episode is going to highlight some of the opportunities that you have for participation.

As most of you know, the DBTAC programs are responsible for providing information on the Americans with Disabilities Act. While our different programs vary in each region, all of our Centers do provide technical assistance, education and training, materials, information and referrals, public awareness ad local capacity building within our communities dealing with disability law compliance. However, our programs are now involved with generating new knowledge regarding ADA implementation. Our current research platform addresses both employment and community participation issues.

So, today I want to tell you a little bit about a few of the projects that are going on around the country and ways that you can get involved.

Our colleagues out in Region Seven, Great Plains, have a couple of really cool projects going on that you can get involved with. The first is a web-based study on community participation. Individuals with sensory impairments or mobility impairments may be eligible to participate in the project. Washington University’s program in occupation therapy, in collaboration with the University of Kansas, and obviously the Region Seven DBTAC, is conducting a study that’s sponsored by NIDRR and what it’s doing is looking at understanding what people with both sensory or mobility impairments do in their daily life, how their environment affects their community participation and what, if any, help is needed to help complete these activities and lead to more full community participation.

To qualify, individuals need to have a mobility, vision, or hearing impairment. You have to be between the ages of eighteen and seventy-five. You have to live in your community and not in a group home or institution, and you must be able to read at a sixth grade level. In this study in particular, participation is going to involve completing a web-based survey of people with disabilities and if you don’t have computer access, the researchers in Region Seven can arrange for folks to answer the survey questions over the phone.

However, this survey is pretty intensive and will take approximately one to two hours to complete, but if you qualify to participate, you will be potentially contacted four weeks later for a follow-up survey. You’re also going to receive a twenty dollar check or gift card to Target or Walgreens and you get to pick the form of your payment. That’s for your time and your effort that you spend completing the survey. If you are selected to complete the second survey, you’re also going to receive an additional thirty dollar check or gift card.

If you’re interested in getting involved in this community participation survey, you can contact the primary individual in Region Seven and her name is Jessica Dashner and her number is 314-286-1640. Again that’s 314-286-1640 or you can call toll free at 800-279-3229. Again that’s 800-279-3229. The survey is also available on the website, if you prefer that. That address is http://enablemob@wustl.edu. Once you get there you click on “Take part in a study of community participation” in the top left corner of the screen.

Just a reminder, if you’re not able to get these numbers or websites jotted down as you’re out and about with your portable device, the information will also be available on our Disability Law Lowdown website, as well.

There’s another cool project that our colleagues out in Region Ten in the Northwest are doing looking at developing educational interventions to positively affect hiring behaviors of employers toward qualified individuals with disabilities and my colleagues, Drs. Bob Fraser and Kurt Johnson are leading the charge on this project. What it does is it’s looking at employer beliefs, external influences and the amount of volitional control that employers have in relation to hiring behavior toward people with disabilities.

The initial step in this project is survey-based research utilizing items related to these beliefs and influences. They’ve collected a bunch of surveys already in the Washington and Oregon areas, however they are interested in getting participation from across the country. If you are an employer or an HR representative or you can get this information out to employers, these survey findings are going to help assist in targeting the relevant beliefs and concerns, external influences and other factors that directly affect outreach to potential employees with disabilities.

By getting folks involved from around the country, the researchers are going to look at variables such as company size, level of education, experience working with disabilities, industry and other kinds of things to help design educational interventions to help increase employment of people with disabilities.

So, for potential participation in this study, if you are an employer or an HR representative or if you’d like further information about how to get employers involved, you can contact Bob Fraser at the Pacific Northwest DBTAC which is headquartered at the University of Washington at 206-744-9131. Again, that’s Bob Fraser at 206-744-9131. Or email him at rfraser@u.washington.edu.

It’s now my pleasure to be able to actually talk with one of my research colleagues out of Region Seven, Kathleen Murphy, who is with SEDL and affiliated with the DBTAC Southwest located in Houston about an upcoming project that they have that you can participate in.

[music plays]

Jana Copeland: It’s a pleasure to have with me today Kathleen Murphy from SEDL. She’s going to visit with us a little bit about the projects that the DBTAC Southwest ADA Center has going. Thanks for being with me today, Kathleen.

Kathleen Murphy: Sure, thanks for inviting me.

Jana: Tell us a little bit about yourself and the organization you’re with.

Kathleen: Sure. As you mentioned, I work at SEDL. SEDL is a private non-profit education, research, development and dissemination corporation. We’re in Austin, Texas and we’ve been here for more than forty years.

SEDL works in research and development projects. We offer professional development, we offer technical assistance and information services and the whole goal is that our partners and clients can bridge that gap between research and practice. We want people to be able to interpret and apply our research findings based on their individual context and experiences.

So we do that in several areas. A big one is improving school performance. We also have an area in after school family involvement, but what’s really relevant to today’s podcast is the department I work in which is Disability Research to Practice. It’s headed up by John Westbrook.

We have a number of projects. They’re all funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. The most established one that some members of your audience may be familiar with is the National Center for the Dissemination of Disability Research. As far as what I do, I help out the NCDDR with its research and evaluation activities. I’ve worked with the Research Utilization Support and Help Project which is winding down. So I’m basically a field researcher, especially in the qualitative area.

Jana: That’s great and I know that for the last couple of years you’ve been able to partner with the DBTAC Southwest ADA Center in some of their research efforts. Can you tell us a little bit about the projects that you’re doing with them?

Kathleen: Those projects I direct myself and we work with Wendy Wilkinson and Vinh Nguyen of, as you mentioned, the Southwest Americans with Disabilities Act Center, one of the ten DBTACs.

The first one is a survey of people who have used the Southwest ADA Center services who also have a disability and have worked at least a little bit in the last five years. We’re just finishing up the data collection on that one and are looking forward to analyzing all the data and seeing what’s going on with them.

We’re also working really closely with Meera Adya and Shelley Kaplan out of the Southeast DBTAC. They have developed, with Wendy and some other people, an online course on the ADA and the ADA basic building blocks. We’re putting together a study to follow up with people who have done that course to see what they’re doing with the knowledge. We’ve had to deal with the recent amendment to the ADA. As they revise the course we have to revise the questionnaire so that’s kind of a project that’s in process.

And then the third one that I really want to focus on today is one that we’re just starting up. It’s already approved and it’s a study of people with disabilities who work in health care. That project is near and dear to my heart as a social anthropologist, that’s what my training is in, because it’s very qualitative. What we want to do is look at health care in Region SIx, that’s the area of the Southwest DBTAC, they’re in Texas and the four surrounding states, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Oklahoma, but for health care, especially in Texas, because that’s really the center of the health care industry.

So, just as it is nationwide, here in Texas health care even now, I mean we designed this before our recent recession and economic blows, but it’s still a relatively high growth area so that the thinking is, gee, it might be a good area for people with disabilities, as well, as a source of employment.

Another reason to look at it is, I don’t know if ironic is the right word, but when you look at occupations in which people are likely to become injured and then perhaps have that develop into a disability, health care occupations are among one the most prone to that, among the top ten like, especially I think it’s third. I was just looking at a list today from news from 2005. Health care assistants are vulnerable to injury and RNs, as well, primarily because of the lifting that they have to do and the back injuries that happen as a result.

Jana: Absolutely.

Kathleen: So it seemed pretty fertile ground and we’re building on other, earlier work, some of which has been complected by Brian McMahon and his team at Virginia Commonwealth University. We worked pretty closely with them because, in addition just to this research that’s of obvious relevance, because they’re working on data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and its integrated mission system to look at who has filed a complaint under the ADA and how it was resolved. They also hold CORC, it’s called, the Coordination Outreach Research Center, which advises all of the DBTAC research projects.

So, I just wanted to put that plug in. I really appreciated all the help that Lynn Koch, our regional advisor, and Brian McMahon have provided to us especially with this study.

So, that provides a nice quantitative look at health care. It’s one of the industries that they can look at and see what’s going on. We’re trying to flesh that out with a qualitative look, interviewing people with disabilities who have worked in health care in Texas and trying to reach not necessarily the coworkers of who they interviewed but coworkers of people with disabilities in general, so anyone who has had experience working with someone with a disability, kind of a second set of interviews for targeting. Thirdly, we want to look at the issue from a management perspective and try to get some interviews with maybe someone from HR or a direct manager or if it’s a relatively small employer, just the employer who can speak to how it’s going for the person they’ve been supervising.

Really, we’re just starting, so if anybody out there would like to be interviewed as part of this study, if you fit into any of those three categories: living in Texas, working in health care and then having this perspective on the issue because you yourself have a disability, you’ve worked with someone who has a disability or you’ve managed, supervised or employed someone with a disability. We would just love it if you could get in touch with me. You can call me on our 1-800 number, 800-476-6861. That’s at SEDL. We’ve set up a special email for this study which is dbtac@sedl.org.

Jana: Well, great, Kathleen. It sounds like you’re willing to talk to lots of people. Are there any other eligibility criteria that potential volunteers out there should know about before they either give you a call or send you an email?

Kathleen: Oh, no. We’re happy to talk to anybody who works in health care in Texas and, as I mentioned, has themselves a disability or you’ve worked with someone with a disability or if you manage or employ someone with a disability.

Jana: Great.

Kathleen: I just wanted to also thank Donna Maheady from exceptionalnurse.com. She’s done some great work, “Leave No Nurse Behind” and has done nine case studies of nurses with disabilities so we know you’re out there.

Jana: Hopefully this podcast will help you track some of those folks down and get them involved and that way you can have a little bit of information about their perspective of being professionals in the health care industry who just happen to have disabilities, as well.

Just for our listeners, could you give us that 800 number and email address one more time.

Kathleen: Sure. It’s 800-476-6861 and the email address is d (as in disability) b (as in business) tac (as in technical assistance center), so dbtac@sedl.org.

But I also want to underscore to people listening, you don’t need an official designation as having a disability. We’re not requiring that you come in and show us that you’ve applied for SSDI or something like that. It’s if you, yourself, it’s self-reported. If you yourself feel like you have a disability, we believe you.

Jana: Absolutely. Well, thanks for that clarification, Kathleen.

Kathleen: Everyone who is interviewed a twenty-five dollar gift card.

Jana: What a great incentive. Well, thank you, Kathleen, for spending time with me today and telling me about some of the exciting research that you’re doing down in the Southwest as well as sharing with our listeners opportunities that they can get involved with your healthcare and employment study that you’re doing. I appreciate your time and I’ll talk with you soon.

Kathleen: Great. Thanks, Jana.

[music plays]

Beth Case: And that’s the end of part one. Be sure to check back in two weeks for part two and if you qualify for any of these research projects, I strongly encourage you to participate. This is how we get policy change and increased funding and awareness about the issues that matter to you. So, if you qualify, check these out.

I’d like to thank Jacquie Brennan and Jana Copeland for letting me be part of their podcast today. If I can put in a plug, you can visit my podcast at Disability-411.com.

Don’t forget, if you have any questions you can contact your local ADA Center and that contact information is in the closing credits which are coming up now.

[music plays]

The Disability Law Lowdown is brought to you by the Disability Business Technical Assistance Centers which are a network of ADA centers that provide training, technical assistance and materials on the ADA and other disability related laws. Funding for the centers is provided by a grant from NIDRR, the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. You can subscribe to the Disability Law Lowdown at our website at disabilitylawlowdown.com or on iTunes.



The Southwest and Rocky Mountain ADA Centers are part of a program of Independent Living Research Utilization at TIRR - Memorial Hermann in Houston, Texas, and is funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. If you have questions about disability law or would like to request materials or training, please call 1-800-949-4232. This podcast is protected by the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works 2.5 License. For more information and transcripts, visit www.ada-podcast.com.