Measuring Community Accessibility for People with Disabilities
Measuring Community Accessibility for People with Disabilities
Project funded by the Office of Disability and Health, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This research is conducted from the Center for Disability Policy and Research (CDPR), an off-campus research institute within the Department of Health Services in the School of Public Health and Community Medicine of the University of Washington. The project focuses on the two major cities, Seattle and Spokane. The CDPR has partnered with the local offices of the Health Improvement Partnership in Spokane, Public Health/ Seattle and King County, in Seattle and Washington State Department of Health to conduct this research.
Project Staff
Principal Investigator: Susan Kinne
Co-Principal Investigator: Donald Patrick
Investigator: Todd Edwards, Allen Cheadle
Project Manager: Beth Aigbe
Partners
Spokane Health Improvement Partnership: Carol Baker
Public Health - Seattle and King County: Shelley Lawson
Washington State Department of Health: Richard Hoskins
Mission
Although disability results from the interaction between a person capacities and the demands of his or her environment, there are few measures of environmental barriers and enablers affecting people with disabilities. This project will develop, test, and disseminate community level indicators that identify and assess important community characteristics and processes affecting accessibility for adults and youth with disabilities. The outcome is a set of observational and routinely collected measures that give an ecological profile reflecting the accessibility of important domains of a community or neighborhood: just how physically and socially accessible are (e.g.) public transportation, schools, retail shopping, public buildings, churches, community organizations? The profile will guide local public health, independent living centers and other groups in deciding where to intervene to have the greatest impact on the accessibility of a community.
Progress
We will continue to develop measures of barriers to
access in selected domains: housing, education, transportation, and
health care facilities. As originally intended, we will draw on local
key informants to assemble information about specific barriers to
access in each of these domains, then select measures. We will collect
data with these indicators, and compare the findings from different
sources to find those that seem most reliable, valid and cheap. But the
outcome will be of two types: community level indicators of access and
barriers, and indicators that an individual could use to determine
access at the time they need the information, within the setting that
matters to them.
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