The Employment and Postsecondary Educational Status of Transition-Age Youths with Visual Impairments.

A limited amount of information is available about the employment and postsecondary educational status of transition-age youths with visual impairments. The National Longitudinal Transition Study (NLTS) provided valuable information about this population, but its data are now more than 15 years old. The NLTS2, a follow-up to the original NLTS, is updating information on the current status of all transition-age youths with disabilities, including youths with visual impairments. SRI International, the organization responsible for conducting NLTS2, publishes comprehensive reports on the employment and postsecondary education results of the study. However, these reports tend to focus on overall results and usually do not provide detailed analyses by disability groups. The purpose of this article is to present the most current data available on the employment and postsecondary educational status of youths with visual impairments. Detailed information about the employment experiences of these youths while in high school; the percentages employed, by educational status; and the percentages attending postsecondary schools are provided. The results are presented for the entire population of youths with visual impairments as their primary disability and with this group divided on the basis of the presence of additional disabilities. Previous research documented that the majority of youths with visual impairments have one or more additional disabilities (65%, including youths with deaf-blindness; Kirchner & Diament, 1999). METHOD Source of data The NLTS2, the source of the data presented here, contains restricted-use data that are available from the Institute of Education Sciences. It is an ongoing longitudinal study, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, that documents the experiences of a nationally representative sample of students with disabilities as they move from secondary school to adult roles. Data are being collected on a wide range of topics, including high school course work and grades, extracurricular activities, postsecondary education and training, employment, independent living, and participation in the community. At the time of this writing, data were available from Wave 1 (collected in 2000-01) through Wave 3 (collected in 2004-05), and data from all three waves were used in these analyses. Sample The sample used for this study was limited to students whose primary disability was visual impairment. Data on employment were available for 518 students from at least two waves. The following number of observations were available at each wave: 507 at Wave 1,503 at Wave 2, and 423 at Wave 3. Longitudinal analyses of work experience during the entire first three waves included all students, regardless of their educational status or age. Analyses of work experience in high school were conducted with students attending school who were aged 16 or older during Wave 2 (n = 358). These analyses were conducted with Wave 2 data because this wave provided the largest sample of students who were still in high school. Demographic information for this subsample is presented in Table 1. The data from Wave 3 were used to determine the current employment and postsecondary educational status of this population, since the youths were older during this wave, and these data were the most recent. Variables The variables of interest to this study were the employment-related (all waves) and current educational status variables (Wave 3). These variables were all available from the interviews with the parents or youths. The primary employment variable that was used for the longitudinal analysis was a question answered at each wave by either the youth or the parent about whether the youth had worked during a preceding period (12 months for Wave 1 and 24 months for Waves 2 and 3). Six different work-related items from Wave 2 were used to provide the data presented in Table 2. …