Examining the National Core Indicators' Potential to Monitor Rights of People With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities According to the CRPD

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) aims to change attitudes and policies toward individuals with disabilities worldwide and to foster the inclusion and independence of persons with disabilities in society. The current study was designed to assess empirically the extent to which people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) exercise certain rights in the United States using the National Core Indicators Adult Consumer Survey (NCI-ACS), particularly to see if items could be scaled to measure certain CRPD articles reliably. An additional aim was to assess the impact of guardianship on the rights of individuals with IDD. NCI-ACS data were analyzed employing factor analysis, multiple analysis of variance, and regression modeling. These approaches allowed us to assess the relationship between guardianship and rights controlling for known covariates (such as level of ID) on outcomes. Results indicate that the NCI-ACS contains several items with sound psychometric properties that can assist in measuring certain rights of people with disabilities according to CRPD. Specifically, employment and budgetary agency appear to be areas of rights outlined by the CRPD that the NCI-ACS can help measure. Finally, the results indicated that people who have an appointed legal guardian are less likely to be employed and to have less social privacy. This study indicates the NCI-ACS has the potential to measure access to CRPD rights, such as employment and budgetary agency, by people with IDD. More work is needed to evaluate additional promising measures of a wider range of CRPD articles. Alternatives to guardianship need to be examined in order to increase the opportunities for people with IDD to exercise their rights.