The Impact of Vocational Rehabilitation Services and Demographic Factors Towards the Successful Employment Outcomes Among Hard-of-Hearing Individuals

• Activity Number: 417 - SPEED: Methodological Developments in Social Statistics, Part 2
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, July 30, 2019 : 2:00 PM to 2:45 PM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): Hansapani Rodrigo* and Shawn Saladin and Sergio Cuevas
• Companies: University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and Uniuversity of Texas Rio Grande Valley and Uniuversity of Texas Rio Grande Valley
• Keywords: Heard of hearing ; Employment outcome; Vocational Rehabilation Services; CHAID; logistic regression

Abstract

This study explored the relationship between demographic variables (gender, race and ethnicity, age, level of education, and secondary disability), and the impact from 28 state-federal vocational rehabilitation (VR) services, on having a successful employment outcome among consumers who are hard-of-hearing. The U.S. Department of Education Rehabilitation Service Administration Case Service Report fiscal year 2014 data was used for the analysis. According to the Chi-square tests, individual impact from all the VR services and the demographic factors were significant except gender (p-value: 0.084). As per the optimal Chi-square Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID) model, use of vocational rehabilitation services was the most influential factor (with the highest mean decrease in accuracy 0.264) which contributes for a positive outcome. A binary logistic regression analysis reveals that when a consumer who is hard-of hearing received on-the-job supports-supported employment as a VR service, the estimated odds of achieving a successful employment outcome is 6.39 times the estimated odds for a consumer who did not receive this service after controlling for other factors in the model.