Secondary Datasets for studying employment, compensation and health outcomes for people with disabilities

National survey and administrative datasets continue to be a rich resource for generating national-level statistics for people with disabilities in the United States. Despite a plethora of existing data sets, very few have been utilized systematically studying employment, compensation and health outcomes for people with disabilities. Heterogeneous definitions of identifying individuals with disabilities as well as the varying sampling framework limit the use of these. Additionally, there are no good tools for comparing these datasets to facilitate making an informed choice to employ the best alternative data set for use in public health research. This presentation will demonstrate a unique web-based resource developed by the Employment and Disability Institute, Cornell University, providing researchers access to meta-data on publicly available datasets consisting of information on employment, compensation, and health outcomes for people with disabilities. This meta-data includes information on data collection and study design, sample population, health conditions/disability measures, links to technical papers, data access requirements and details. In addition, to the meta-data, the presentation will also demonstrate online data directories built for providing a deeper exploration of key data elements of the secondary data sets focusing on variable related to disability characteristics, employment, compensation, and health outcomes. These data directories also map key characteristics to survey questions enabling researchers to study these elements in detail. One of the primary features of these tools is that it presents concise and accurate information on multiple publicly available data sets for public health research in a single browsing environment.