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Hiring Biases and Attitudinal Impediments to Employment for Persons with Disabilities
Research Project Overview
Type: Experimental Field Investigations
Status: Scheduled to begin in October 2008.
Theme: Employment: Attitudes
Summary and Outcome Goals
This research project from the DBTAC: Southeast ADA Center (Southeast DBTAC) uses an experiment to investigate whether employer’s biases and attitudes affect the hiring of people with disabilities. In this research, employers are sent identical resumes from two different applicants— the names of schools and previous employers are changed but the types of education, qualifications, and years of experience are the same. It is obvious that one applicant has a disability, while the other apparently does not. The question to be answered in this research study is whether or not the applicant who does not appear to have a disability is called-in for an interview more frequently than the individual with an identified disability.
When researchers ask employers to report whether or not they prefer to hire people without disabilities, they claim that they do not. However, employment statistics and lab-based experiments looking at cause-and-effect relationships both show that people with disabilities are hired less often. By combining the strengths of experimental research (the ability to identify cause-and-effect relationships) with field research (the use of real-world settings and tasks), the results of this study will fill a gap in our understanding of factors affecting the employment of people with disabilities.
