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    Unemployment, Welfare, and Social Security Disability/SSI Benefits: How They Affect One Another
    Liebkemann, Kevin; Cebula, Raymond A. III (2006-12-01)
    This article will help you understand the requirements of Unemployment (UI),Welfare(TANF/GA), and Social Security Disability (SSI/SSDI). Finding the program that is right for you will save time and help you get the most help possible. This article includes: An overview of all three programs, with information about eligibility and benefit amounts; a short discussion of how disability and work affect each program; and an explanation of how each program affects the other, with advice on how to handle common issues you might face.
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    Promising Practices: Reaching Out To The Vietnamese Community of Massachusetts
    Cebula, Raymond A. III (2006-06-28)
    The hall marks of respect and quiet listening are continual themes running through outreach efforts to the Vietnamese community of Massachusetts. Particularly when dealing with the elderly, the notion of respect is critical in breaking through to the client. Quiet listening and a show of respect for the individual will allow “entrance” into this community that is seen as closed to the issue of disability. A general distrust of government, based upon prior life experience of many elderly members of this community, also adds to the difficulty of breaking through in an effort to provide needed services. Having a staff person who is also a member of the community has also been seen as a necessary component in outreach and education efforts.
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    Promising Practices: Reaching Out To The African-American Community In Illinois
    Cebula, Raymond A. III (2006-06-28)
    Building trust and allowing for the development of a level of comfort has allowed Equip for Equality to successfully reach out to the African-American community in Chicago and rural Illinois. While the Illinois African-American community was seen as the initial target of outreach efforts, it soon became clear that there were differences to be dealt with when reaching out to the Chicago community and to the rural Illinois community.
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    Promising Practices: Reaching Out to Rhode Island's Deaf and Hard of Hearing Community
    Cebula, Raymond A. III (2006-06-28)
    Protection and Advocacy (PABSS) staff are responsible for providing legal services to social security recipients who are facing barriers in their efforts to return to work. Benefits Specialists are responsible for reaching out to all recipient communities within their territory to provide information and planning services when a recipient is considering a work effort. In September of 2004, the Rhode Island BPA&O project noted that deaf and hard of hearing individuals were not utilizing benefits counseling services. A work group was created to address this situation and develop a strategy. The strategy included outreach to community groups and agencies serving deaf and hard of hearing individuals and aggressive referrals of deaf and hard of hearing individuals to benefits planners by the state’s vocational rehabilitation workers. In preparation for this work, benefits planners received training in using a TTY, placing calls through the Rhode Island Relay Service and effectively utilizing sign language interpreters.
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    Material Hardship, Poverty, and Disability among Working-Age Adults
    She, Peiyun; Livermore, Gina A. (2006-04-01)
    We use longitudinal data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) spanning the 1996 to 1999 period to estimate the prevalence of several types of material hardships among working-age people with and without disabilities. The hardships studied relate to: the ability to meet expenses; ability to pay rent or mortgage and utility bills; ability to obtain needed medical and dental care; and food security. Several alternative measures of disability are used, including distinctions between short and long-term disability. We find that, regardless of the disability measure used, people with disabilities experience various kinds of material hardship at substantially higher rates than their counterparts without disabilities. Hardship experiences did not differ dramatically between those with short and long-term disabilities. We estimate logit models of the likelihood of reporting material hardships to assess the importance of disability after controlling for income and other sociodemographic characteristics. We find that disability is an important determinant of material hardship even after controlling for these factors. All else constant, the odds of reporting hardship are 70 to 280 percent greater among people with disabilities compared with people without disabilities, depending on the measure of disability and the specific hardship considered. To illustrate the differences between those with and without disabilities from another perspective, we use the logit estimates to calculate the household income individuals with disabilities would need to attain the same likelihood of reporting a given material hardship as those without disabilities with household income at the official poverty level. We find that people with disabilities living alone would need annual incomes on the order of $18,000 to $38,000 to experience the same level of hardship, on average, as those without disabilities with incomes at the poverty level (about $10,000), depending on the nature of the disability and the hardship considered. We also estimate disability prevalence among working-age people with incomes at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level and reporting hardships. A large majority of the low-income respondents reporting a material hardship in 1998 also reported a disability of some sort between 1996 and 1999. Among the hardships studied, people with disabilities made up the largest shares of those not getting needed medical care (64 percent) and those reporting food insecurity with hunger (72 percent). The findings suggest that comparisons of conventional poverty rates for people with and without disabilities may understate the differences in the relative economic well-being of these two populations. At a given level of income, people with disabilities will not, on average, achieve the same level of material well-being as those without disabilities. The findings provide support for policies that account for disability-related expenditures and needs when determining eligibility for means-tested assistance programs. The findings also highlight an important limitation of the official poverty measure; it overstates the economic relative well-being of a group that represents a large share of the low-income population, people with disabilities.
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    An Inventory of Disability Information for the Population Living in Institutions
    She, Peiyun; Stapleton, David C. (2006-03-01)
    The population living in institutions is excluded from most major national surveys. We evaluate the implications of this exclusion for disability statistics and research by compiling and examining existing disability information for the population living in institutions, with an emphasis on working-age people. The population living in institutions is a very small share of the entire population, but increased considerably from 1990 to 2000, especially for those ages 18-64. Working-age people accounted for a much larger proportion of the population living in institutions in 2000 (56 percent) than in 1990 (45 percent). As of 2000, 86 percent of the institutionalized working-age population resided in correctional institutions, and the remaining 14 percent were approximately evenly split between nursing homes and other institutions, many of which specialize in care for people with disabilities. When disability is defined as having at least one of the four disabilities in the 2000 Census—self-care, mental, physical, or sensory disabilities—the vast majority of the population with disabilities lives in household units; 8.7 percent live in group quarters (GQs), 6.4 percent live in institutional GQs, and 2.3 percent in non-institutional GQs. For working-age people with disabilities, the share of males living in institutional GQs is much larger than the share of females (7.7 percent versus 1.7 percent), in part reflecting the fact that more than nine out of ten inmates in correctional institutions are male. Working-age people with disabilities residing in institutional GQs are also disproportionately African American (38.6 percent of those ages 18-49 and 22.4 percent of those ages 50-64). Increased incarceration rates and the relatively high prevalence of disability in the incarcerated population suggest that growth in incarceration could have a substantial impact on disability prevalence in the household population, and on the characteristics of the household population with disabilities, most notably for young male African Americans. The nursing home residence rate declined for all age groups, but for those under 65 the decline is very small relative to the size of all persons in that age group, and thus seems unlikely to have much impact on disability statistics for the household population. We found no surveys covering the population living in institutions other than correctional institutions and nursing homes. The lack of information on this population may present a substantial problem for disability statistics and research.
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    Removing Barriers to Survey Participation for Persons with Disabilities
    Mitchell, Susan; Ciemnecki, Anne; CyBulski, Karen; Markesich, Jason (2006-01-01)
    The National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) has recently defined a new paradigm of disability (NIDRR 2000). Under the new paradigm, disability is a deficit in the person-community relationships that should be addressed by social interactions. The goal of the new paradigm is to facilitate the full participation of people with disabilities in society. Implied by the shift are survey research methods that require new approaches to measuring disability in federally funded surveys and new approaches to making surveys accessible to people with disabilities. Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. has gained experience in conducting surveys of people with disabilities through contracts sponsored by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). This paper synthesizes the major points from these projects, and draws on Mathematica Policy Research Inc.’s broader survey experience to formulate a set of practical recommendations for conducting surveys with people with disabilities.
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    A Difficult Cycle: The effect of labor market changes on the employment and program participation of people with disabilities
    Stapleton, David C.; Wittenburg, David; Maag, Elaine (2005-10-01)
    This paper examines the dynamics behind the employment and program participation trends of workers with disabilities. We find strong evidence that labor market declines induce male workers with disabilities to exit employment and enter the disability programs. However, the evidence only weakly supports the hypothesis that male workers with disabilities are more likely than those without disabilities to lose their jobs in a declining labor market. Rather, those who lose their jobs are much less likely to re-enter employment in later years. Our findings for women with disabilities suggest that adverse labor markets do not have a disproportionately large impact on employment exits, though they do induce program entry.
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    Rising Poverty in the Midst of Plenty: The Case of Working-Age People with Disabilities
    Burkhauser, Richard V.; Houtenville, Andrew J.; Rovba , Ludmila (2005-01-01)
    The United States Bureau of the Census creates official poverty rates for most economically vulnerable populations, but not for working-age people with disabilities. We create a comparable poverty measure for working-age people with and without disabilities using March Current Population Surveys (1980-2005) and find that the poverty rate of working-age people with disabilities relative to working-age people without disabilities has grown considerably. While the poverty rate of working-age people without disabilities fell by over 20 percent over the period 1983 to 2004 (trough years of the 1980s and 1990s business cycles), the poverty rate of those with disabilities remained about the same. Using shift-share analysis we show that the increase in the poverty rate of working-age people with disabilities over the 1980s business cycle was not greatly affected by compositional changes, but almost two-thirds of the decline in their poverty rate over the 1990s business cycle was do to composition changes. When we control for compositional change, we find that the underlying poverty rate of working-age people with disabilities was greater in 2004 than in 1983. When we adjust for compositional changes in both groups, we find that the uncontrolled increase in the relative poverty risk of working-age people with disabilities is slightly reduced over the 1980s, but rises even more over the 1990s business cycle. But on net, the underlying relative poverty rate of working-age people with disabilities is far higher in 2004 than in 1983. The first step in reversing these socially unacceptable outcomes is for the United States government to provide an official poverty rate measure of the working-age population with disabilities, both to better track the progress of this economically vulnerable and little understood population and to determine the causes for the increase in their risk of poverty.
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    The Effects of Welfare Reform on Young Women With Disabilities
    Horvath-Rose, Ann; Stapleton, David C.; O’Day, Bonnie (2005-01-01)
    This paper uses the Current Population Survey (CPS) data to show that changes in family policy implemented in the 1990s led to a substantial increase in the number of young women who report work limitations. These changes also affected measures of socioeconomic outcomes for young women who report limitations. The findings emphasize the importance of disability to family policy issues, and suggest that past underreporting of disability by young mothers might well have disguised its importance. They also suggest that the impacts of family policy on mothers with disabilities have been quite different than the impacts on other mothers. An important effect of family policy changes may have been to segregate low-income mothers with disabilities from other low-income mothers, continuing to relegate them, and possibly their children, to lives of poverty and dependency.