Community engagement initiative on receptivity of people with disabilities

Community interventions designed to improve receptivity for people with disabilities are being conducted in a project funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research at the Great Plains Disability Business and Technical Assistance Center that covers urban and rural communities throughout a four-state region of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. The methods used in the research project include recruiting community programs as partners, stakeholder meetings, infrastructure meetings, intervention planning and measuring outcomes of the process. The aspects of the communities targeted in the intervention include transportation, health care facilities and hospitality businesses and tourist sites. A set of objective measures (Community Health Environment Checklist – CHEC) specific to types of sites (e.g., health care facilities, restaurants, hotels) were used to assess accessibility. One subjective measure (Disability Rights Attitude Survey – DRAS) was used to assess the attitudes of the infrastructure representatives about people with disabilities in their communities. Another subjective survey (Survey of Participation and Receptivity in Communities (SPARC) was used to assess the perspective of people with disabilities toward the people working in the targeted community intervention sites. This study will use a single group repeated measures design to test the influence of the community engagement initiative process. Data will be collected at the individual, environmental and organizational level at two time points; before and after the community intervention. The process and preliminary results of community engagement initiatives to address transportation in an urban Missouri community and health care in a rural Iowa community will be presented.