Poverty as a Cause of Increasing Numbers of Disabled Minorities?

Abstract

This paper discusses the current issue of the rapidly increasing correlating trend of poverty and the disabled. Addressed within this paper will be an analysis on the current theme, the strategic intervention and its rationale. Also addressed in this paper is the history of the problem and relating theories that that best fit the problem and intervention strategy. Provided in this paper is a detailed preliminary literature review of the topic and problem of interest.

Overview

 The two-way link between poverty and disability creates a vicious circle (Jones & Reed, 2005). Poor people are more at risk of acquiring a disability because of lack of access to good nutrition, health care, sanitation, as well as safe living and working conditions (Ministry of Welfare, 2008). Once this occurs, people face barriers to the education, employment, and public services that can help them escape poverty (U.S. Current Population Survey - People with Disabilities). Disability rates in the population are higher among groups with lower educational level in the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Ministry of Welfare, 2008). On average, 19 per cent of less educated people have disabilities, compared to 11 per cent among the better educated. Ninety per cent of children with disabilities in developing countries do not attend school (Jones & Reed, 2005). In the OECD countries, students with disabilities in higher education remain under-represented, although their numbers are on the increase (Ministry of Welfare, 2008).

Problem and Purpose Statement

People with disabilities are dear members of our schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. Every person has talents and a distinctive perspective to contribute. Research suggests one way of prevention of impairment is through inoculation, better health care and/or nutrition, is vital and needs to be clearly distinguished from interventions aimed at combating the social exclusion and denial of human rights that disable people with impairments (Albert, Dube, & Riis-Hansen, 2005).

 There are a number of organizations and agencies who provides consumer-driven services to support people with disabilities and their families in achieving their goals (Jones & Reed, 2005). Through information-sharing, individual advocacy support, independent service coordination and educational workshops, there an advancement of people’s knowledge of resources and help them to build life-long advocacy skills (Jones & Reed, 2005). The purpose of this study is to bring awareness to this prevalent problem and implement strategic interventions to reduce and eventually eradicate the stated issue.

Topic Significance to Human Service

As currently viewed, disabled people struggle to find employment (Albert, Dube, & Riis-Hansen, 2005). Physical impairment generally makes it difficult to work in the agricultural sector, which dominates in all the economies (Green & Hulme, 2005). Vocational training opportunities are limited, but do tend to be in urban areas and are not generally associated to gainful employment. Because they are seen as presenting a high risk, disabled people are also usually denied access to micro-credit schemes (Kenny, 2005).

Research questions/hypotheses

 Addressed in this research are the research question that asks, what is the correlation between poverty and the disabled population in the North Carolina? A second research questions asks, how many individuals have access to adequate health insurance and early medical intervention that suffer from poverty and disabilities? The research hypothesis states that due to lack of adequate health insurance and early intervention efforts are fundamental reasons for increasing numbers of minorities being identified with disabilities.

Limitations to the Research

Limitations to this research include a number of themes. Locating disabled and poverty stricken people to participate in study will prove to be a difficult task. Usually these members do not have access to technology driven means of participating in surveys (i.e. web based surveys). Accessing a sample for study can prove to be difficult as well. There is no concrete concept in finding people that suffer from both poverty and disability (s). Another limitation that a researcher may discover is locating enough funds or having a budget for adequate researcher assistants to work with disabled participants in explaining or assisting participants in comprehension of the research, purpose, and participatory activities.

Addressing gaps in the knowledge base

There are gaps addressed with this research problem. Based on current research, there is a lack of statistics relating to the number of disabled people living in chronic poverty. Also noted as a disparity is the number of disabled people are included in policy making, consultation, and implementation of economic empowerment.

Minorities, Poverty, and Education

 Based on data from qualitative interviews with 50 high-achieving low-socioeconomic students of color, two clusters of important and symbiotic protective factors are identified and explored (Morales, 2010). Each cluster consists of a series of interrelated protective factors identified by the participants as crucial to their statistically exceptional academic achievement. Using resilience theory, a detailed examination of how these groups of protective factors mitigated the potential effects of risk factors, thus contributing to the process of academic resilience, is presented. Practical uses of protective factor clusters also are presented and explored.

 Another article presents a comparative analysis of elderly Black women's and men's decisions to use self-care (Turner & Battle, 2010). The research evolves from the premise that healthcare attitudes and trends are shaped by our health values, which are defined as our desirability for certain health conditions.

Poverty and Social Welfare

 Even in Japan, ranked among the richest countries in the world, poverty is a phenomenon that is prevalent among a certain section of the population (Ogawa, 2010). The underlying concept that extends throughout the book is that of social exclusion, an idea originally put forward in France during the 1980s when France faced the emergence of long-term unemployment among the youth, a situation that the existing social security system was unable to cope with. The idea of social exclusion was later adopted by policy makers of the European Union, who intended to eradicate poverty, create an inclusive labor market, and increase the integration of the disabled, the ethnic minorities and the immigrants into the society.

Disabilities and Children

 Data on the prevalence of childhood disability and the circumstances and characteristics of children with a disability are crucial to understanding the relationship between impairment and social disadvantage (Blackburn, 2010). Researchers in Coventry investigated the prevalence of childhood disability in the UK and social and household circumstances. The objective of the study was to use a life course approach to assess the ways in which childhood socioeconomic position may be associated with disability in later life. The researchers used longitudinal data from the nationally representative Health and Retirement Study (1998–2006) to examine associations between parental education, paternal occupation, and disabilities relating to activities of daily living (ADLs) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) (Bowen & Gonzalez, 2010).

Protection for the Disabled

 The Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970 was the UK's first piece of disability rights legislation placing a duty on councils to provide community care services to disabled people in need (Samuel, 2010). Poverty and hate crime blight the lives of many; independent living remains a dream for others; and the act's promise of a right to care has never been fulfilled because of rationing. All of these must be tackled. But the immediate priority is ensuring disabled people are protected from the worst of the coming spending cuts.

 The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was heralded as an "emancipation proclamation" for Americans with disabilities. Nevertheless, twenty years after its enactment the overall socioeconomic status of persons with disabilities in the United States is tenuous.'' In particular, notwithstanding the express requirement that employers provide reasonable workplace accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities, nearly all empirical analyses conclude that the relative employment rates of disabled persons has not improved significantly since the statute's passage (Stein, Waterstone, & Wilkins, 2010).

Explains how the proposed study furthers knowledge on the topic

 The model is powerful because it illuminates the fact that the roots of poverty and powerlessness are not in biology but in society (Jones & Reed, 2005). Society, on the other hand, can through collective action be transformed. A human rights approach to development offers the platform for such cultural and societal transformation (Albert, Dube, & Riis-Hansen, 2005). It also provides a way for disabled people to transform their sense of who they are - from stigmatized objects of care to valued subjects of their own lives (Jones & Reed, 2005). For people who are poor and oppressed this is a key starting point of any meaningful process of social and economic development (Albert, Dube, & Riis-Hansen, 2005).

Method of Research

 The method of research used for this particular study will be correlation survey design. Correlation is a statistical technique that can show whether and how strongly pairs of variables are related (Green & Hulme, 2005). In relation to the study, poverty and suffering from a disability can be correlated. An individual can experience poverty and as a result develop a disability. Same can be deemed as true in reverse, one can have a disability that results in suffering from poverty.

Sampling

A stratified random sampling procedure was used, to make sure that representations of population subgroups (e.g., sexes, races, regions) were proportional (Smith, 2001). First, dividing the population into distinct, independent strata can enable researchers to draw inferences about specific subgroups that may be lost in a more generalized random sample (Porter, 2004). In this case, the participants were divided between families (two parent and single). The children participants were of random ages and were subgrouped according to ages. The families were then placed in subgroups based on race. Participants were asked to rank their income levels using the Income Ranking Scale (IRS) developed by Tillman (2010) and provide current medical records on all family or household members. The scale reflects a family’s income based on numbers. Information such as school records and medical records were collected on children of the adult participants. The children participated in one-on-one and group sessions, depending on the age of the child (toddlers to adolescents). Children also participated in surveys that rated characteristics of subjective poverty. All data was collected and recorded under each family.

Data Collection (including instrumentation, reliability, and validity)

Precision is expressed as validity and reliability. Validity represents how well a variable measures what it is supposed to (Dillman, Eltinge, Groves, & Little, 2002). Validity is important in research studies: if the validity of the main variables is poor, a researcher may need thousands rather than hundreds of subjects (Sax, Gilmartin, & Bryant, 2003). Reliability tells how reproducible your measures are on a retest, so it impacts experimental studies: the more reliable a measure, the fewer subjects needed to see a small change in the measure (Sax, Gilmartin, & Bryant, 2003). For example, a crossover with 200 subjects will prove sufficient to characterize even a small effect, if the measure is highly reliable. Through the use of surveys and interviews, direct measurement, and available records, researchers were able to assess the data collected. The scores from the data were indicated by using the value of the correlation coefficient. The values, ranging from -1.00 to +1.00, indicated the strength of the relationship between poverty and disabled participants.

Operational Definition

An operational definition, when applied to data collection, is a clear, concise detailed definition of a measure (Dillman, Eltinge, Groves, & Little, 2002). For this study, data collected will be erroneous if those completing the analysis of data collected are not careful to review all aspects of disabilities. Reviewing information collected from school(s) and medical doctors is vital in understanding the level of disability in a family member prior to the actual inventory assessment.

Statistical Procedures

 For an accurate estimate of the relationship between variables, a descriptive study usually needs a sample of hundreds or even thousands of subjects (Adèr, Mellenbergh, & Hand, 2008). For this case, the author used 200 families with one to or more children from across the state of North Carolina. The estimate of the relationship is less likely to be biased if you have a high participation rate in a sample selected randomly from a population (Adèr, Mellenbergh, & Hand, 2008). Participants were randomly chosen from an newspaper advertisement and posters stationed in hospitals, health departments, free clinics, various shelters, housing projects, and schools. Once participants arrived, they received a research assistant to explain the purpose of the research, collect medical records and sign consent forms. From there participants were directed to rank income of each family member. After the participants were completed with all research procedures, they received snacks and beverages before leaving.

Expected Findings

Reflecting on the beginning of the initial analysis until now, the problem assumed that poverty was the cause of an increasing disabled population. After reviewing current research from the United stated and developing countries all over the world, poverty and a growing number of disabled people is suggested to be the cause of each other or interrelated. A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research titled Half in Ten; states that almost 50 percent of working-age adults who experience poverty for at least a 12-month period have one or more disabilities (Ervin, 2009). People with disabilities account for a larger share of those experiencing poverty than people in all other minority, ethnic and racial groups combined and are even a larger group than single parents (Ervin, 2009).

As currently viewed, disabled people struggle to find employment (Albert, Dube, & Riis-Hansen, 2005). Physical impairment generally makes it difficult to work in the agricultural sector, which dominates in all the economies (Green & Hulme, 2005). Vocational training opportunities are limited, but do tend to be in urban areas and are not generally associated to gainful employment. Because they are seen as presenting a high risk, disabled people are also usually denied access to micro-credit schemes (Kenny, 2005).

Conclusion

 For decades the international disability movement has been saying that disability is a cause of poverty, that poverty often leads to disability and that disabled people are among the poorest of the poor in any country (Hickey & Bracking, 2005). While prevalence may be useful to some extent, there is clearly need for data that can give a thorough picture of the situation for disabled people, possibilities for comparing between groups (including disabled and non-disabled), documenting and analyzing mechanisms explaining the close link between disability and poverty (Albert, Dube, & Riis-Hansen, 2005).The poorest and most marginalized are at the greatest risk of disability (Hickey & Bracking, 2005). Within the poorest and most marginalized, disabled women, disabled ethnic minorities, disabled members of scheduled castes and tribes, and so on will be the most excluded (Kenny, 2005).

References

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