Intersecting Social Identities and Postsecondary Education Outcome in Transitioning Youth with Disabilities

Background

Postsecondary education is one of the important markers for successful transition to adulthood in youth with disabilities. Historically, they have experienced poor postschool outcomes when comparing to their peers with no disability. Intersectional life course perspectives direct our attention to the complexity of educational disparities experienced by transitioning youth with disabilities and its interconnectedness to larger societal, political, cultural, and developmental contexts. This study is to examine the role of the intersecting social identities of disability, gender, and race in postsecondary education outcome among transitioning youth with disabilities with the following research questions: 1) Are the disability types associated with postsecondary education outcome? 2) Does social bond impact the relationship between the disability types and postsecondary education outcome? And 3) Does postsecondary education outcome vary by gender, race, and disability?

Methods
This study employs secondary data analysis using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) in the U.S., a large-scale longitudinal dataset including information on health-related behaviors of a heterogeneous sample of adolescents in grades 7 to 12 at Wave 1. We tracked college degree attainment among these adolescents at Wave 4 when they aged between 24 and 32. We identified 981 adolescents with disabilities including 10.6% learning, 3.6% physical, 2.6% intellectual, and 2.4% multiple disabilities. For the main analysis, this study employed hierarchical generalized linear regression models.

Results

The results indicated no significant difference in college degree attainment across disability types while controlling for other variables. None of the social bond variables had a significant impact on postsecondary education outcome among young adults with disabilities. We also found no significant interacting effect of sex and disability types while there was significant interaction effects of race and disability types on postsecondary education outcome. Native Indian youth with disabilities had lower odds of completing a college degree than whites youth with disabilities (OR = -0.00, p < 0.001). However, for those with learning disabilities, the negative impact of race decreased, resulting in higher odds of college degree attainment (OR = 0.00, p < 0.001) than whites with physical disabilities. Black youth with disabilities had higher odds (OR = 27.94, p < 0.01); however, this was offset by having a learning (OR = 0.01, p < 0.01), intellectual (OR = -0.00, p < 0.05) or multiple (OR = -0.00, p < 0.001) disabilities, which lowered the odds of college degree completion than whites with physical disabilities. Hispanic youth with multiple disabilities had lower odds (OR = -0.00, p < 0.001) than whites with physical disabilities. For Asian youth with disabilities, having a learning (OR = 0.00, p < 0.001) or an intellectual disability (OR = 0.00, p < 0.001) offset the negative impact of race on odds of completing a college degree (OR = -0.00, p < 0.001) compared to whites with physical disabilities.

Conclusions

Transition programs for youth with disabilities require an understanding of how their intersectional social identities create unique barriers and resilience in order to provide developmentally and disability sensitive services for their successful transition to adulthood.