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Article Excerpt
people with disabilities encounter a number of barriers as they make the decision to enter or re-enter the workplace. Some of these barriers might be described as external as they involve environmental and workplace supports such as transportation, accommodations, and job opportunities (Loprest & Maag, 2001). Other barriers might be described as internal, as they involve self-perceptions regarding adequacy of work experience, work skills, and vocational beliefs that are necessary considerations and influences in the job search process (Bolton, 1983; Belgrave & Walker, 1991; Corbiere, Mercier & Lesage, 2004). Whatever the locus of these barriers, there is ample evidence that they may represent impediments to work. For example, despite the increase in general employment rates over the past ten years, adults with disabilities continue to lag behind their nondisabled counterparts in terms of hours worked, wages earned, and unemployment and under-employment rates. In these areas, men and women who report a work limitation earn an average of 46% of their nondisabled counterparts' earnings; and report an unemployment rate of almost 81% compared to 23% of those without a work limitation (Houtenville, 2006).
In response to these employment disparities for people with disabilities, a number of studies have investigated various aspects associated with positive employment outcomes. They include research on personality and psychological attributes (Asbury, Walker, Maholmes, Green & Belgrave, 1994; McShane & Karp, 1993), demographic and disability characteristics (Capella, 2003; Marshak, Bostick & Turton, 1990; James, DeVivo, & Richards, 1993; Moore, 2002), and employer attitudes and workplace issues (Gouvier, Sytsma-Jordan, & Mayville, 2003; Kenny, 1998), among others. Despite the number of studies, findings have been inconclusive due, in part, to the multivariate nature of the variables involved and the lack of theoretical grounding of the studies (Saunders, Leahy, McGlynn & Estrada-Hernandez, 2006).
One area that has received considerably less attention in terms of understanding career-related behavior is how perceived barriers influence pursuit of career goals. Lent, Brown and Hackett (2000) describe career barriers as objective (e.g., socioeconomic status) or perceived (e.g., gender bias); similarly Crites (1969) described career barriers as external or internal. From this theoretical perspective, perceived career barriers represent "events or conditions either within the person or in his or her environment that make career progress difficult" (Swanson & Woitke, 1997; p. 434). Kenny and her colleagues (Kenny, Blustein, Chaves, Grossman & Gallgher, 2003) view constructs such as career barriers within a dynamic person/environment process, where an individual "actively processes and gives meaning to environment experience and acts on these interpretations in ways that further shape the environment" (p. 142). For example, if an individual with a disability anticipates encountering stigma in the workplace, his or her subsequent behavior toward co-workers may reflect this expectation, which in turn may affect co-worker behavior. Perceived career barriers have been found to have considerable influence over various career-related behaviors of diverse groups, including women, ethnic minorities, college students, urban adolescents, and individuals with disabilities (e.g., Bishop, 2002; Brooks, Martin, Ortiz, & Veniegua, 2004; Fouad & Byars-Winston, 2005; Gutman, McKay, Ketterlinus, & McLellen, 2003; Lopez & Ann-Yi, 2006; Kenny et al., 2003).
The concept of perceived career barriers was first explored as a factor that might help explain career choices of women, particularly regarding their under-representation in science and technology careers (Lent et al., 2000; Swanson, Daniels & Tokar, 1996). In 1997, Swanson and Woitke suggested that perceived barriers affect both career choices and performance for women. Subsequent reports have supported these findings (Albaugh & Nauta, 2005; Lent et al., 2000), and further elaborated on how perceived career barriers influence the choice and performance behavior of groups cited earlier. The purpose of this study is to explore perceptions of career barriers among a sample of individuals with disabilities in order to increase our understanding of their role in career development, and how they are influenced by individual attributes and social support factors.
Work Barriers and People with Disabilities
As indicated earlier, assessing the extent to which individuals identify specific career barriers derived from studies that examined career choice disparities, first for women (Swanson & Woitke, 1997; Richie et al., 1997), and for ethnic minorities (Hackett & Byars, 1996; McWhirter, 1997). This has been a steadily evolving research area over the past decade. However, the career barriers construct for people with disabilities has been less frequently reported in the literature. A 2001 report on the barriers to work for a national sample of working age adults who had self-reported work limitations identified transportation and access to job information as being the top-ranked barriers for their sample (Loprest & Maag, 2001). Other studies examining career barriers of specific groups of individuals with disabilities have investigated people with HIV/AIDS (Brooks et al., 2004), those with psychiatric disabilities (e.g., Braitman et al., 1995; Corbiere et al., 2004), and people with physical disabilities (Feldman, 2004). Generally, these studies have found that career barriers--both those anticipated and those encountered--play a significant role in the individual's engagement in work and/or perceptions of barriers regarding return to work. However, few of these studies have examined either the extent to which barrier perceptions influence subsequent decisions regarding the pursuit of vocational goals, or the extent to which they are mitigated by other factors.
The current study uses a sample of individuals with disabilities who are presumably interested in working as they are potential applicants for public vocational rehabilitation services that are expressly designed to assist eligible individuals to enter or reenter work. A national study of the vocational rehabilitation program (Hayward & Schmidt-Davis, 2003) found that about 80% of individuals who applied for services to vocational rehabilitation agencies are accepted for services; about 12% drop out prior to service initiation, and about two/thirds of individuals who are accepted for services achieve an employment outcome, indicating that just over half of all applicants for services are eventually successful. The causes of unsuccessful closures have been explored in relation to race, (Wilson, 2002) gender (Danek & Lawrence, 1994), and type of disability (Bolton, Bellini, & Brookings, 2000), but are much less frequently reported in terms of assessing individual's perceptions of how various factors might impede their employment success.
Over the past decade or so, career barriers have been described in the context of Social Cognitive Career Theory (Lent et al., 2000; Swanson & Woitke, 1997; Albert & Luzzo, 1999). In a theoretical review of career barriers, Lent et al (2000) wondered at the relatively modest effects of perceived barriers on...
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