Barbara M. Altman

Predictors of Wages Comparisons by Gender and Type of Impairment

This paper examines the relative importance of type of impairment and gender in the prediction of wage income. Data come from the National Medical Expenditure Survey (NMES) conducted in 1987. The sample includes those people who worked at all during 1987 and is divided into four groups of workers with impairments (those with only a mobility impairment, only a hearing impairment, or only a visual impairment, and those who had any combination of visual, hearing, and mobility impairments) and the remaining group of workers in the general population. Results show that workers with two types of impairments actually earned more than their same-sex peers in the general population, but all groups of women earned less than their male peers. The stronger effect of being male than of any type of disability in predicting wage income was shown by regression equations which included several interaction terms. The results support the interpretation that the labor force treats workers with impairments similarly to their nonimpaired peers of the same sex. The difficulty of changing gender-based labor-force processes is discussed.

INTRODUCTION: OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS OF DISABILITY USING THE NHIS-D

In spite of the challenges that disability measurement creates in interpretation of results, this volume contains an exciting variety of different types of papers that add not only to our information about persons with disabilities, but also serve as a useful guide to using this extensive data set to address the numerous questions about this population. Following an overview discussion about the development and production of the NHIS-D, this volume has four separate sections. In the first section three papers describing methodological issues in using the NHIS-D are presented. This section includes a paper on factors associated with response patterns (Hendershot et al.) and another on a strategy to overcome the problems of missing data (Witt et al.). The third paper examines disability prevalence by interpreting the NHIS-D data into domains of the ICF classification (Fedeyko & Lollar). The next section contains three papers which focus on work and health care for adults with disabilities (disability measured in different ways), particularly the barriers they experience in those areas. Included in this group are papers on barriers to work (Loprest & Maag), barriers to preventive care (Jones & Beatty), and the effect of insurance as a facilitator and barrier to health care for mobility limited adults (Iezzoni et al.). The third section of four papers focuses on developmental disabilities. Larson et al. discuss the variety of definitions of developmental disability and how those definitions can be operationalized with the measures used in the NHIS-D. Two of the papers examine the outcomes or consequences of childhood disability. Honeycutt et al. focus on the economic costs of developmental disability across the life-span and Maag examines the unmet need for supportive services for this population. Hogan et al. also looks at consequences for siblings of children with disabilities. This section can also be viewed as a methodological one providing a variety of ways to measure developmental disabilities within the same data source. The next section looks at the needs and characteristics of two specific populations; Native Americans (Altman & Rasch), and adult women with MR/DD (Anderson et al.). It also contains a unique approach to understanding the effects of two different aspects of disability, the age of onset of the disability and the proportion of life lived with a disability (Verbrugge & Yang). The book concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of NHIS-D work (Drabeck).

Environmental contexts and disability

This volume presents papers which address both individual and societal levels of environment in relation to disability and shed new light on the processes involved with creating or modifying these environmental supports or barriers.