When the revamped DisabilityStatistics.org website launches later this month, it will provide data about disability prevalence and demographics on the national, state, local and legislative-district level. DisabilityStatistics.org is published by the Northeast ADA Center, which is housed in the Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability, located in Cornell's ILR School. The DisabilityStatistics.org team includes Senior Research Specialist Bill Erickson and Development Lead Camille Lee.
"We conducted interviews and user testing with U.S. Senate and other congressional staffers, as well as state disability program managers working in the area of disability policy," explained Lee. "Our goal is to help individuals spend less time searching for data and more time doing the work our communities need," Lee said.
The site provides data in map, chart and tabular format, along with text summaries that describe the displayed data. Data can be compared in several ways, including across up to seven geographic areas, and the maps, charts and other displays can be downloaded or copied from the site to be included in reports and presentations.
Based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau's annual American Community Survey, the site provides what Lee describes as "an extremely wide range of disability statistics with estimates that are difficult to find or do not exist elsewhere on the internet." One of these sources, which is prepared by Erickson using high-powered computing services at the Cornell Center for Social Sciences, is a 3.2 million-row data table.
On Feb. 26, Erickson and Lee will give a webinar-based presentation, Launching the new DisabilityStatistics.org: Get the latest ACS disability estimates with new tools.
