Disability.gov: Countdown to the 20th Anniversary of the ADA: Day 25 - Disability Statistics

Image via Wikipedia

By Guest Blogger Cherise J. Hunter, Research Analyst, Office of Disability Employment Policy, U.S. Department of Labor

Did you know that a VERY important announcement is made the first Friday of EVERY month? It is publicized on virtually every news network and is often viewed as a major indicator of the status of the U.S. economy by politicians, researchers, economists and everyday citizens alike. It is the release of the nation’s unemployment rate - which, by the way, currently stands at 9.9 percent. It is released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and represents the most comprehensive measure of national employment and unemployment. These measures are obtained from a survey called the Current Population Survey (CPS), conducted monthly by the U.S. Census Bureau for the BLS.


Unfortunately, the CPS was not originally designed to capture whether or not the person being surveyed has a disability (although certain questions address the issue). However, since June 2008, the Census Bureau has asked six new questions, the purpose of which is to identify whether the person who is surveyed has a disability and the nature of the disability. The six survey questions are:

• Is {person} deaf or does {person} have serious difficulty hearing?
• Is {person} blind or does {person} have serious difficulty seeing even when wearing glasses
• Because of a physical, mental or emotional condition, does {person} have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering or making decisions?
• Does {person} have serious walking or climbing stairs?
• Does {person} have difficulty dressing or bathing?
• Because of a physical, mental or emotional condition, does {person} have difficulty doing errands alone such as visiting a doctor's office or shopping?

This information is vital for the disability community because it provides a primary source of data on employment status and characteristics of the labor force, emerging trends and changes in the employment rate of individuals with disabilities. What do the current numbers reveal? Well, according to the April 2010 CPS (not seasonally adjusted), the employment rate of the civilian noninstitutional population with disabilities, ages 16 to 64, was 28.9 percent compared to 70.0 percent for persons without disabilities. The unemployment rate for individuals with disabilities was 15.5. One of the most striking statistics involves the participation rate. Only 34.5 percent of individuals with disabilities ages 16 to 64 are participating in the labor force compared to 77.3 percent of persons with no disability!

Evaluating and researching this data will take time. But stay tuned! In addition, to the disability labor force status data released every month at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t06.htm, a CPS supplement is currently being planned by the Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) and BLS to delve further into disability employment data in order to better explain what these numbers really mean for people with disabilities and employers.

For More Information
To learn more about the CPS disability statistics, visit
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsdisability.htm. To find data from June 2008 through May 2010, visit http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab6.htm and select one or more questions from the data table on the page, then scroll down to click the "Retrieve data" button.