Department of Mathematics & Statistics, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Greensboro, NC, United States of America.
Department of Counseling, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Greensboro, NC, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2023 Nov 16;18(11):e0290573. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0290573. eCollection 2023.
Although existing research has generated a wealth of information related to employment for individuals with disabilities, a major limitation is that common measurements of employment do not fully capture the scope of the optimal outcome specified in public policies, namely, competitive integrated employment. Therefore, we aimed to describe the change and stability in multiple aspects of employment for youth with disabilities from high school age to mid-30s under the structural equation modeling framework.
We identified a sample of 1,921 youth with disabilities who were at least 18 years old in 2003 from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth- 1997. We estimated a series of latent growth curve models to assess trajectories of job quality, indicated by hourly pay, and stability, indicated by weekly work hours, over a period of 15 years.
Trajectories of job quality and stability did not covary or load on a common factor, but there was substantial variability within the sample in both the intercept and slope of these two constructs, which were best captured by a cubic growth curve, and partially explained by health condition and several demographic variables.
Competitive integrated employment comprises of multiple components which should ideally be considered along a time dimension. Future studies need to assess validity of the measurement model with a different sample and incorporate another important component of competitive integrated employment, that is, whether work is carried out at an integrated setting.
尽管现有研究已经产生了大量与残疾人就业相关的信息，但一个主要的局限性是，常见的就业衡量标准并不能完全捕捉到公共政策所规定的最佳结果的范围，即竞争性综合就业。因此，我们旨在描述在结构方程建模框架下，从高中到 30 多岁的青年残疾人在多个方面就业的变化和稳定性。
我们从国家青年纵向调查-1997 年中确定了一个样本，该样本包括 1921 名至少在 2003 年年满 18 岁的残疾青年。我们估计了一系列潜在的增长曲线模型，以评估 15 年期间的工作质量（以小时工资表示）和稳定性（以每周工作小时表示）的轨迹。
工作质量和稳定性的轨迹没有相互作用或共同作用，但在这两个结构的截距和斜率上，样本内有很大的变异性，最好用三次增长曲线来捕捉，并且部分由健康状况和几个人口统计学变量来解释。
竞争性综合就业包含多个组成部分，理想情况下应沿时间维度来考虑。未来的研究需要用不同的样本来评估测量模型的有效性，并纳入竞争性综合就业的另一个重要组成部分，即工作是否在综合环境中进行。
