In honor of National Disability Employment
Awareness Month and Veterans Day November 11, I gleaned some practice tips from recent research studies on physical disability
and career development.
The goal is to inform and link career development practitioners working
with disabled clients to research and resources they may not be aware of.
Why should we pay attention to disability in career development?
- In 2005, one in five U.S. residents reported some level of disability (U.S. Census 2008) with the number rising with large numbers of returning veterans.
- Individuals with disabilities comprise the largest minority group in the United States, with almost half the population living with one or more chronic health conditions. (Foley-Nipcon and Lee, 2012)
Finding: Severity of the
disability and age of disability onset matters
When counseling physically disabled individuals, “the
perceived severity of the disability and the point in the life span at which it
occurred are not negligible details…”*
Study authors found that:
- Disability severity and age of onset significantly relate self-efficacy with Realistic, Artistic, Social and Conventional domains. Only the Investigative domain had insignificant relation – perhaps because of its focus “on mental tasks performed alone and that require minimal physical mobility."
- “[S]elf-rated disability severity does not have a detrimental relation with vocational self-efficacies among those who become disabled early in life.”
- By contrast, “individuals who become disabled later in life show a steeply negative relationship between self-rated disability severity and self-efficacies.”
*Tenenbaum, R. Z., Byrne, C. J., and Dahling, J. J. (2014). Interactive Effects of Physical
Disability Severity and Age of Disability Onset on RIASEC Self-Efficacies, Journal of Career Assessment, Vol. 22(2)
274-289. Note: this study did not include anyone with blindness. Please see any other limitations the authors list.
This study supports recommendations in the diverse
populations chapter of NCDA’s Career Development
Facilitator “Facilitating Career Development: Student Manual (Rev. 2nd
Edition). It recommends that practitioners consider when in the lifespan the
disability occurred – taking into account possible feelings of loss, guilt and
grief.
Additional resources:
National Career Development Association website’s List
of Resources for People with Disabilities
Eby, L. T., Johnson, C. D., & Russell, J. E. A. (1998).
A psychometric review of career assessment tools for use with diverse
individuals. Journal of Career Assessment,
6, 269–310.
Feldman, D. C. (2004). The role of physical disabilities in
early career: Vocational choice, the school-to-work transition, and becoming
established. Human Resource Management
Review, 14, 247–274.
Foley-Nicpon, M., & Lee, S. (2012) Disability research
in counseling psychology journals: A 20-year content analysis. Journal of Counseling Psychology 59,
392–398.
Peterson, D. B., & Elliott, T. R. (2008). Advances in
conceptualizing and studying disability. In S. D. Brown & R. W. Lent
(Eds.), Handbook of counseling psychology
(4th ed., pp. 212–230). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc.
If you know of other research or resources I have not included, please leave a comment and I will add it to the post.
