THE HARRIS POLL #34, July 05, 2000

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One of the most serious consequences of having a disability is that it tends to increase social isolation and reduce community participation. This is not because people with disabilities do not want to be more involved or to participate more. One problem is that many people with disabilities do not feel their participation is welcomed by community organizations.

These are the results of a nationwide survey of Americans with and without disabilities conducted for the National Organization on Disability and made possible by a grant from Aetna U.S. Healthcare. The survey was conducted on the Internet with nationwide samples of 535 people with disabilities and 614 people without disabilities between March 22 and April 5. The survey was conducted by Harris Interactive using its nationwide panel of approximately 6.4 million adults who have agreed to be surveyed online. Both the samples of people with and without disabilities have been weighted to be representative of all Americans with and without disabilities. In so far, as there may be differences between the weighted data from this online survey and the total population, both online and offline, these should in no way affect the differences between the two samples of people with and without disabilities who were surveyed.

Major findings of the survey include:

• More people with disabilities (35%) than people without disabilities (21%) say they feel "not at all involved" in their communities.
• For people who are very or somewhat disabled (as opposed to those with slight or moderate disabilities), this number rises to 40%.
• People with disabilities are more than twice as likely as those without to say they are "not at all satisfied" with their level of community involvement (23% vs. 11%).
• People with disabilities (31%) are more likely than people without disabilities (21%) to say that they feel strongly that they are not a contributing member of their communities.
• People with disabilities are more than twice as likely as people without disabilities to say that they feel isolated from other people (46% vs. 23%).
• People with disabilities are much more likely than people without disabilities to say they feel left out of things in their communities (48% vs. 32%).
• People with disabilities are more likely than people without disabilities to say that they are not regularly invited to give their opinions on community issues (65% vs. 54%).

When people who want to be more involved in the community are asked why they are not as involved as they would like to be, people with and without disabilities give very different answers. For Americans without disabilities the most important single reason, by far, is that they feel they do not have the time (76%). Only 34% of people with disabilities say this.

The main reasons given by people with disabilities for not being as involved in their communities as they would like to be are that they do not feel encouraged by community organizations to participate (54%), that they don't have the income necessary to participate (53%), or that they are not aware of what activities exist (46%). People without disabilities are substantially less likely to give these answers.

People with more severe disabilities are particularly likely to feel that community organizations have not encouraged or invited them (64%).

Base: All Respondents

"Why are you not as involved in your community as you would like to be?

Data were weighted by age, sex, education, income, race/ethnicity, and region, as well as propensity to be online (a composite of several factors) in order to generalize the results to the national population.

In theory, with a randomly chosen sample of this size and after weighting the data, one could say with 95 percent certainty that the results have a statistical precision of plus or minus 2 percentage points of what they would be if the entire adult population of the United States had been polled. The sample used by Harris Interactive is not a random sample. While individuals have been randomly sampled from our database for this survey, they have previously chosen to take part in the Harris Interactive database.

There are several other possible sources of error in all polls or surveys that are probably more serious than theoretical calculations of sampling error. These potential sources of error include question wording and question order, non-response, and screening (e.g. for likely voters). It is difficult or impossible to quantify the errors that may result from these factors so the words "margin of error" should be avoided when reporting all survey data.

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