Professor presents Disability report in Washington

Policy & Practice, Dec, 2007

Despite accounting for many ethnic, age and gender groups, the U.S. Census Bureau's data on the current population fail to include statistics regarding the disabled population, according to researchers at Cornell University.

Professor Andrew Houtenville and fellow researchers at Cornell are seeking to alleviate this absence with the second annual Disability Status Report for 2006, presented recently in Washington, D.C., to an audience of about 50 Capitol Hill staffers, disability-related agencies, the media and advocacy groups. Houtenville is the director of Cornell's Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Disability.

Houtenville, who is a professor of industrial and labor relations, and three others were principal investigators on the report, funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. The report provides an overview of the key demographic and economic statistics of the disabled population from 2006. The investigators generated these statistics using data from the American Community Survey, "a U.S. Census Bureau survey designed to replace the decennial census long form."

By the U.S. Census Bureau