Campus Location

Abilene Campus (Residential)

Date of Award

5-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Social Work

Degree Name

Master of Science

Committee Chair or Primary Advisor

Kyeonghee Jang

Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor

Stephanie Hamm

Third Committee Member or Committee Reader

Abbey Green

Abstract

Individuals with disabilities face difficulties in both higher education and the workforce. While it would seem that they would be equipped to deal with these difficulties, high levels of college dropouts as well as pay gaps and high levels of underemployment suggest otherwise. Although there are many studies on disabilities and its relationship to singular factors, there is a lack of empirical study on the holistic relationship between disabilities and multiple factors. The purpose of this study is to explore how environmental factors, individual-external factors, and individual-internal factors are related to a successful transition from higher education to the workforce among study population. This cross-sectional study used survey responses of a convenience sample of 25 adults with disabilities who had previously been enrolled at a faith-based university in Texas. A hierarchical linear regression analysis was conducted to explore the impact that each factor has on the outcome variable. Although individual-internal factors and individual-external factors influenced the outcome, they did not have a significant effect. Among the group of environmental factors, campus climate and utilization of accommodations both had a significant relationship with a successful transition to the workplace. The findings show that campus climate was the strongest predictor, meaning that campus climate had a higher impact than utilization of accommodations. These findings suggest that institutions of higher education need to focus their policy and practice related to students with disabilities on the topics of improving campus climate and ensuring that accommodations are available to be utilized by students. Further investigation is needed to validate these findings using an experimental study with a representative sample.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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