Joy Hammel co-PI and site PI for $2.5 million National Institute of Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research five-year center grant

Joy Hammel is co-PI and site PI of a $2.5 million National Institute of Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research five-year center grant:”Advancing Participation Equity: The Americans with Disabilities Act Participation Action Research Consortium (ADA PARC) Center.” Hammel will be director of research activities for the center.

The grant will run from 2022 to 2027. The center is funded at $2.5 million, with $1,030,000 coming to UIC. The UIC component involves collaboration between the Department of Occupational Therapy, Department of Disability and Human Development, UIC College Urban Planning and Public Affairs, and the Great Lakes ADA Center.

The rest of the funds involve community-based participatory research with the national network of ADA Centers and disability rights organizations nationally.

Our team will be conducting a number of social determinants of health equity analyses, evaluating the impact an immediate access website to share findings with disability rights communities, and designing and testing a community-based peer networking intervention program to advocate for systems and policy change actions to improve community participation opportunities.

ABSTRACT: Over 32 years since the ADA was passed, people with disabilities continue to experience participation disparities in community living (CL), community participation (CP) and economic equity (EE). These disparities unfold at national, state and city levels, directly affecting participation rights, choice, and control. Stark disparities have been further brought to the forefront with the COVID pandemic. Public health disparities research has applied the Social Determinants of Health (SDH) framework to examine how environmental factors influence health disparities of other underrepresented populations, such as by race, ethnicity, and income. Research that has included disability has studied it as a negative outcome, rather than examining whether people with disabilities as a societal group have equitable access to health and participation opportunities like any other societal group, the level of disparities they experience, and the extent to which environmental factors at the micro (immediate), mesa (neighborhood and community) and macro (policy, systems, economic, and sociocultural) levels affect those disparities or afford opportunities. This type of equity research examines to what extent where you live, and the level of access to opportunities and resources you have, impact your everyday participation, and directly informs policy, systems, and community level actions specific to people with disabilities and to the ADA. ADA PARC will build on many years of participatory action research (PAR) done in collaboration and partnership with a consortium of ten 10 ADA Centers, the ADA Knowledge Translation (KT) Center, and a national network of disability organizations and communities. We propose to strengthen this consortium, and increase its impact on community actions targeted at addressing disparities, over the next 5 years by collaborating on the following PAR initiatives:

• Examine existing participation disparities using large population level datasets, comparing people with and without disabilities, on 53 indicators of participation (CL, CP, and EE) to document the most current disparities findings, and trends over time;
• Analyze findings specific to people with disabilities from underrepresented communities and intersecting identities by race, ethnicity, age, economic status, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity, to document disparities of diverse people with disabilities and communities;
• Analyze findings specific to the immediate and long term impact of COVID on the participation of people with disabilities living in community and institutional settings;
• Validate and share participation equity scorecards that summarize disparities across SDH indicators, and allow stakeholders to compare disparities at state and city levels;
• Revise and expand the existing immediate access, interactive ADA PARC website (adaparc.org) to report these findings in multiple, accessible formats for different stakeholders to utilize in actions, and evaluate the KT impact with website users;
• Collaboratively design an online, peer mentoring intervention program to create citizen scientists and change agents from diverse disability groups and communities who will learn how to make sense of this disparities research, and use ADA PARC findings to advocate for systems and policy changes at national, state and community levels. This intervention, referred to PEN (Participation Equity Navigators), will be evaluated in a study with 200 diverse participants with disabilities to determine its feasibility, accessibility, outcomes, and KT impact for individual participants and diverse communities they represent; and,
• Deliver training and KT activities to widely disseminate ADA PARC findings to disability community and key stakeholders involved in ADA implementation and systems change