The population of people with disabilities in the United States has increased by 2.2 million over the five-year period between 2005 and 2010, according to new data released last week by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The timing of the bureau’s announcement coincided with the 22nd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act on Thursday, July 26. As Shaun Heasley noted in his dispatch for Disability Scoop, it was the first time the agency had released figures since 2005. Of the 56.7 million Americans who currently fit the definition of an individual with a disability, 1.2 million were adults with an intellectual disability, and just under one million more adults reported a developmental disability such as autism or cerebral palsy. Meanwhile, 1.7 million children were also found to have an intellectual or developmental condition, the report said.
Matthew Brault was the author of the 23-page report (PDF). As a statistician for the Health and Disability Statistics Branch in Census Bureau’s Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division, Brault has spent the past seven years studying the social and economic characteristics of people with disabilities in this country. On Monday, he contributed the guest blog post, “Counting People with Disabilities,” to the Disability.gov website, in which he provided some context for the methodology.
Brault acknowledges that different surveys may vary widely in their estimates of people with disabilities in the U.S. population; anywhere from 22 million by the American Housing Survey to 62 million in a National Health interview. Because the Census Bureau data is used in budget projections by the Social Security Administration, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Administration on Aging, he writes that the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) instrument he uses is deliberately blunt:
Disability and functioning are continuums ranging from ‘able to do most or all basic activities with little or no difficulty or help from technology or another person’ to ‘completely unable to do most or all basic activities, even with assistive technology or other aids.’ Under this gradient, most people fall somewhere in between. We use categories like ‘with a disability’ and ‘with no disability’ to make it easier to describe the population, even though the threshold for how much difficulty constitutes a disability may not be clear.
While a more nuanced consideration of individuals with disabilities might generate different data, the role of governmental agencies is to ensure that no person eligible for assistance falls through the cracks. Erring on the broad side enables these service providers to be better prepared. As we’ll see in tomorrow’s post when we look at the economic characteristics of the population of Americans with disabilities, these safety nets are still crucial for making life matter for these individuals.
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Image by Mike Coghlan, used under its Creative Commons license.