Perceived socioeconomic status among young adults with developmental physical disabilities: Findings from a longitudinal study

Objective: This study investigates how young adults with developmental physical disabilities perceive themselves on a social ladder - a measure of subjective social status. Methods: Data come from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a longitudinal, nationally representative study of American adolescents in the 7th-12th grades in the 1994-1995 school year. Social status was measured when respondents were between 24 and 32 years old (2008). We conducted all analyses in Stata version 11.2. Survey commands were used to adjust for Add Health's complex survey design and to apply sampling weights to obtain national population estimates. Ordered logistic regression was used to determine associations between physical disability and subjective social status. Results: We used data from 9,730 participants. Approximately 6% of participants had a developmental physical disability; of the total analysis sample, levels of impairment were minimal (3.4%), mild (1.3%), and severe (1.1%). Compared to respondents without disabilities, only individuals with mild impairment ranked themselves as significantly lower on the social ladder (OR = 0.61; 95% CI [0.42, 0.90]). Discussion: Although literature indicates that individuals with disabilities have poorer employment outcomes when compared with peers without a disability, our findings suggest, contrary to expectation, that perceived socioeconomic status is only related to mild disability. Conclusion: These early dissertation findings suggest that long-term effects of disabilities on perceived human capital accumulation are not linear. Understanding these patterns, and how they intersect with objective measures of human capital, is urgently needed to improve socioeconomic outcomes of individuals with disabilities.