OBJECTIVE: This prospective study was designed to evaluate a disability awareness training program for medical students. METHODS: First- and second-year medical school students participated in an interactive disability awareness program consisting of 6 sessions spaced across 1 year. The Modified Issues in Disability Scale (MIDS), administered at program commencement and ...

Disagreement about the proper attitude toward disability proliferates. Yet little attention has been paid to an important meta-question, namely, whether "disability" is an essentially contested concept. If so, recent debates between bioethicists and the disability movement leadership cannot be resolved. In this essay I identify some of the presumptions that ...

The purpose of the current study was twofold: (a) to investigate if it was possible to train three different games (both as a leader and as a participant) to a child with developmental disabilities through interaction with 4 typically developing peers, and (b) to examine if correct responding would be ...

An unknown number of medical school faculty have disabilities, and their experiences have generally escaped notice and scrutiny. Although most medical schools offer long-term insurance and extended leaves of absence for disability, relatively few have policies explicitly addressing accommodations for faculty with disabilities as they perform teaching, research, and clinical ...

Congress intended the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA") to provide strong standards for addressing and eliminating discrimination against individuals with disabilities. Many commentators have concluded, however, that the federal courts are undermining the goals of the ADA by too narrowly construing membership in the statute's protected class. One example of ...

Qualitative research methods were used to examine transition experiences of (a). 9 young adults with severe disabilities during their last year of high school, (b). their parents, and (c). professionals from schools and adult service agencies. Students were remarkably articulate about plans following graduation but had few opportunities to meaningfully ...

PURPOSE: In recent decades Western psychology has conceptualized learning disabilities (LD) in terms of deficits and such related 'social emotional issues' as insecurity, low self-esteem and social isolation that can be rehabilitated through combined remedial teaching and psychological intervention. With increasing advocacy and legislation on behalf of people with disabilities ...

Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition, spelling and decoding abilities. Research findings agree that these and other observed behavioral manifestations largely result from a deficit in the phonological component of language. However, conflicting theories ...

BACKGROUND: Dyslexia is the most common subtype of learning disabilities with a prevalence ranging from 5-10 per cent. The central difficulty in dyslexia is the phonological awareness deficit. The authors have developed a screening test to assess the reading ability of Thai primary school students. OBJECTIVE: 1. To study the ...

BACKGROUND: Previous research suggests that the inadequate primary health care received by people with learning disabilities may be the result of general practitioners' (GPs) negative attitudes. Few studies have investigated the evidence for this assumption. This study uses psychological theory to inform an investigation of the attitudes and emotions experienced ...

The use of IQ scores and discrepancy formulas for identifying specific learning disabilities (SLD) has been widely discredited by prominent researchers for more than a decade. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of state policies still specify the use of discrepancy formulas, including the simple difference method, which is psychometrically inferior to ...

PURPOSE: The purpose of this article is to discuss what employers and policy makers can do to promote employment success for persons with disabilities. A study carried out in Rehabilitation Science at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada identified a number of themes, definitions of success and recommendations for change. METHOD: This ...

This article reviews the provisions of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act as they apply particularly to students with autism. It also refers to the antidiscrimination provisions of the Rehabilitation Act Amendments (Sec. 504) and to their relevance to students with autism. It attempts to answer specific questions posed by the ...

Osteoarthritis is a major cause of disability in both the developed and developing world. With the population aging, the prevalence of osteoarthritis is increasing and its consequences are impacting significantly on society. This is one of the reasons why osteoarthritis has been adopted as a major focus (along with osteoporosis, ...

Federal legislation requires that students with disabilities receive services to assist them in the transition from high school to post-secondary life. Transition services must address students' understanding of their disability, learning strengths and weaknesses, career decision-making skills, and preparation for the increased demands of postsecondary education. This study surveyed coordinators ...

Fluent reading, often defined as speed and accuracy, is an important skill for all readers to develop. Students with learning disabilities (LD) often struggle to read fluently, leading to difficulties in reading comprehension. Despite recent attention to reading fluency and ways to improve fluency, it is not clear which features ...

OBJECTIVES: To develop a screening tool to detect those who may have intellectual disabilities or borderline intellectual disabilities in the criminal justice system (CJS). DESIGN: The items for the assessment tool were based on data from an earlier study. The assessment tool was piloted on 80 participants, who also completed ...

OBJECTIVE: This study sought to determine whether persons with psychiatric disabilities who filed employment discrimination complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) were referred to the EEOC's mediation program with the same frequency as ADA claimants with other disabilities. The extent to ...

The aim of this paper was to promote the use of musical interventions with clients with learning disabilities. Musical interventions with this group of clients were found to be effective in reducing self-injurious behaviour, aggression and other behaviour, which challenge the service providers. Music was also found to have the ...

Using the Multidimensional Students' Life Satisfaction Scale-MSLSS(Huebner, 1994), we compared life satisfaction reports of 80 high school students with mild mental disabilities with a matched sample of 80 typically achieving students. The results provided preliminary support for the use of the MSLSS in research with secondary school students with mild ...

The expansion of the number of students requesting accommodations in postsecondary settings compels clinicians to become knowledgeable about the legal definitions and documentation requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Because the law is relatively new, courts and regulatory agencies have only recently begun to clarify what constitutes a ...

PURPOSE: This paper is a literature review, the purpose of which was to examine the legislative framework and the Australian Government Information Policy and how this has impacted on virtual communication and the well-being of Australians with disabilities. METHOD: This has been a systematic review of current Australian literature that ...

The study evaluated a treatment approach based on urine-alarm signals and staff prompts to foster daytime urinary continence of a student with multiple disabilities. Reinforcement was used for urination in the toilet. The study alternated two baseline with two treatment phases. A 3-mo. follow-up also occurred. The student became almost ...

Christine, an adult with developmental disabilities, had no history of education. A nonreader, she began to receive literacy tutoring at age 35. In 7 years she was educated through an eclectic approach that primarily entailed echo reading of brief passages, such as sentences and stories. She moved from holistic recognition ...

OBJECTIVES: To do a needs assessment directed to neurologists attending a workshop on communication skills emphasizing relationships between physician and patient, assessment of disability and quality of life of migraine patients, and communication of therapies for migraine. METHODS: A structured questionnaire was sent to all participants related to the issues ...

This study was aimed at teaching three persons with multiple disabilities to carry out functional activities at appropriate times independently. To this end, an electronic time system that produced vibratory alarms at preset times and a board with object-cues (instructions for the activities) were used. Data indicated that all three ...

This study was an effort to subtype adolescents' learning disabilities using scores on the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery-Revised. A cluster analysis of 88 cases classified as learning disabled and 75 as nonlearning disabled was conducted to characterize subtypes. Two distinct subtypes emerged for the group while one for the nonlearning disabled ...

BACKGROUND: The aim of the present study was to investigate whether Judaism's positive attitudes toward people with disabilities would influence greater willingness towards inclusion of such people in regular classes and a greater sense of self-efficacy in working with them. METHODS: The present authors compared religious (n = 175) and ...

This study measured the anxiety, attitudes toward people with disabilities, and sex roles of a sample of undergraduate men attending a military college in the southeast (n=58). Students who had voluntarily participated in the college's "Buddy Program," in which the students interact on a weekly basis with people with mental, ...

What follows is a response to an article by Spiecker and Steutel in which they pose the question of whether sex between people with "mental retardation" (sic) is morally permissible and in which they argue that since many such people cannot give "valid consent", the additional consent of caretakers may ...

PURPOSE: The Disability Adjusted Life Year (DALY) is a unit that was developed for use in cost-effectiveness analysis and epidemiology studies. It is a combined measure of both death and disability, and has been extensively utilized in several countries and across various conditions. The purpose of this paper is to ...

Multiculturalism, in its broadest terms, not only is defined by race and ethnicity but also involves topics of gender, sexual orientation, and disability. Underlying this notion is the assumption that there is no one way to conceptualize human behavior, no one theory that explains the realities and experiences of various ...

This article is intended to help those unfamiliar with disability studies by providing a context for disability on which psychologists can build. The 1st part presents data on disability training in graduate clinical programs and on training accessibility for graduate students with disabilities. The 2nd part is an introduction to ...

Major new ideas and opportunities shape the direction of reform in serving those coming to the end of life. Framing the problems as arising from changing demographics and evaluation of how we envision categories seems better than past ways of framing the issues. Another useful strategy is to build programs ...

J, a mature age student with severe dyslexia, entered university with virtually no reading and writing. She could recognize very few words, she had difficulty with spelling simple words and her handwriting was poor. She also had distinctive difficulties with numbers. Yet, she graduated successfully 3 years after entry. In ...

A comprehensive national portrait of employment and income status of adults with developmental disabilities was estimated through secondary analyses of the 1990 and the 1991 Survey of Income and Program Participation. Results indicate that the majority of adults with developmental disabilities had very limited economic resources, even when earnings from ...

This study was designed to assess whether the impact of a microswitch-based program on indices of happiness would be comparable with that of a stimulation program. Three persons with profound multiple disabilities participated. The microswitch-based program produced increases in indices of happiness which were fairly clear for the first two ...

Wage differential studies examining legally protected groups typically focus on gender or racial differences. Legislation also fully protects individuals with learning disabilities (LD). This article is the first to decompose wage differentials between adults with and without LD. An original data set of college graduates with documented LD was constructed, ...

The Learning Disability Index (LDI) is one of many diagnostic indicators proposed for the identification of students with learning disabilities that relies on patterns of performance on cognitive tests. The LDI is hypothesized to relate to students' specific neuropsychological deficits. The present study investigated the diagnostic utility of the LDI ...

This study investigated the relationship of depressive symptomatology to type of classroom placement in a sample of adolescents with learning disabilities who attended an urban public high school. Fifty-two students, half of whom were in self-contained classrooms and half of whom were in general education classrooms with resource room, self-rated ...

This article highlights recent and pending United States Supreme Court cases interpreting employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act and discusses their implications for spine professionals. The implications include how Spine readers approach evaluations of employees and job applicants with disabilities and workplace accommodations in light of the recent ...

Utilitarianism is more convincing than resource egalitarianism or welfare egalitarianism as a theory of how resources should be distributed between disabled people and nondisabled people. Unlike resource egalitarianism, utilitarianism can redistribute resources to the disabled when they would benefit more from those resources than nondisabled people. Unlike welfare egalitarianism, utilitarianism ...

BACKGROUND: The high support needs of elderly people with cognitive disability raise questions about the cost-effectiveness of different treatments. Associations between costs and cognitive disability could be influenced by other factors, particularly comorbidities. AIMS: To examine the links between costs and cognitive disability in the context of covariates. METHOD: Secondary ...

Despite the requirement of many employers to provide accommodations in the workplace for individuals with disabilities under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the preponderance of accommodations that have been described in the literature concern physical rather than psychiatric disabilities. This study was an exploratory, descriptive, longitudinal, multi-site ...

Being a professional artist is a possible career for people with psychiatric disabilities; however, this vocation traditionally has been associated with mystique that has not always been complimentary. One program that is working to mitiigate the negative impact of this mystique while promoting professional and as a vocational option is ...

OBJECTIVES: To compare the early employment careers of people with disabilities and their non-disabled contemporaries. STUDY DESIGN: The employment of 436 people with disabilities was investigated between the ages of 23 and 33. The sample were part of a continuing longitudinal study, the National Child Development Study (NCDS), of some ...

Work-related musculoskeletal injuries represent a major source of work disability. While many employers recognize the importance of workplace disability management approaches and are assuming greater responsibility for preventing and minimizing work-related disability, questions about the effectiveness of these interventions exist. The purposes of this article are to: 1) describe the ...

This article examines the applicability of the antidiscrimination provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 to The Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act (TWWIIA) passed in 1999. Among other policy changes, under the Ticket to Work program, eligible recipients of disability insurance (SSDI) and supplemental ...

How do non-standard jobs affect the economic well-being of workers with disabilities, and what happens when non-standard workers use disability lawsuits to challenge discrimination and improve their economic opportunities? This study uses data from the Current Population Survey, the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and a Lexis search of ...

Sixty-eight students with reading disabilities (RDs) and 55 non-reading-disabled university undergraduates composed the sample. Students with RDs met either low achievement (LA) or regression-based discrepancy (D) criteria. In addition to IQ and reading decoding measures, all participants received measures of phonological awareness (PA), confrontation naming, and verbal fluency. Consistent with ...