Rural people with disabilities still struggling to recover from the recession - Entrepreneur Generations

It's well-known that rural areas have been slower to recover from the Great Recession than urban areas, but University of Montana researchers have identified another demographic still struggling: people with disabilities, especially those in rural areas.

The researchers, who work for the university's Research and Training Center on Disability in Rural Communities, analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, which was released in December and aggregates data from 2013 to 2017, and compared it to data from the 2008-2012 edition to see how employment rates changed over time for rural residents with disabilities. They included those with sensory, physical and mental disabilities.

"For the U.S. as a whole, rates of employment increased across those two five-year study periods for people with and without disabilities. However, people without disabilities increased by 1.7 percentage points, while those with disabilities increased by just 0.8," the researchers write for The Conversation. "What’s more, people with disabilities are already much less employed than people without disabilities. We found that this difference is widening over time."

What's more, employment rates among people with disabilities varied significantly in different parts of the country; those in New England, West South Central, Mountain, and Pacific states (as defined by the Census Bureau) had a particularly hard time finding employment.

Those lower employment rates mean the rural disabled have less access to health insurance, retirement benefits and other financial resources, the researchers report.

from The Rural Blog http://bit.ly/2CVkV0J Rural people with disabilities still struggling to recover from the recession - Entrepreneur Generations

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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