Employment acquisition

Employment specialist traced actual time spent either directly or indirectly working for the person with ASD across various types of supported employment interventions. This included developing a vocational profile about the person served, developing a job, job site training, and long term supports to enhance job retention. All data were stored in password protected database. The employment specialist's intervention time and participant outcomes were aggregated across the group of participants and over time.

The following data demographics, internship characteristics, job coach interventions was collected for each young man.

Information was collected from the application process and a brief interviews at scheduled times to gain insight into the person's employment status, wage earned, hours worked, and employer paid benefits. The Supports Intensity Scale was also used to assess adaptive behavior and intensity of support needs. The six subscales used were: home living, community living, lifelong learning, employment, health and safety, and social. The SIS allowed the examiners to identify the types of work supports individuals required and provided a measure of the overall adaptive behavioral support needs of participants at baseline. Data collectors were trained in the administration of the instrument and inter-rater reliability was high 92.5%.Preliminary analysis included frequencies, means, standard deviations and distribution of scores.

Case study information came from a key informant. Participants were referred to this organization by the state vocational rehabilitation agency for telework skills training and job placement.

Each participant had a targeted work related tasks to learn. The first had roller setting and combing out. The second had combing out and roller setting. Roller setting was judged based on a predetermined criteria. Combing out was observed and afterwards the task was judged on predetermined factors. The other two participants, the third and fourth received training on comfort inquires and suggestive statements. Work tasks were selected where specific comfort inquiries (i.e.. Is the water to hot?) and suggestive statements (using hair styling products) were appropriate. The mentor and experimenter determined 1 to 3 minimal opportunities to make comfort inquiries and 1 to 2 minimal suggestion statements for each type of service. Observers were trained on all behaviors or products to an interrater reliability of 85% or more by observing other students in the program.
Each participant completed a circle of support form during baseline and at the end of the study. Both participants and mentors completed a questionnaire to gauge their views about the peer mentoring role.

The specific variables measured in this study included: the influence of duration of community-based training (CBT) that included on-the-job training, on the-job training as a subset of CBT, the least restrictive environment (LRE), or the degree of integration with non-disabled peers during the school day, demographics(gender, ethnicity, home setting, behavior problems, physical disability and mental ability) as measured by
intelligence quotient (I.Q.).Data was collected by structured interview with teachers and administrators, record review and on site observations. Correlations were used to examine predictive relationships between the independent variables and the dependent variable of post-school integrated employment. Cross tabulations and chi-square analysis of correlated variables were then used to identify significance of specific variables on employment outcome.

Three state computer databases provided data for analysis. The client treatment database provided information on client characteristics and treatment activities. Computer records from the Employment Security Department provided employment data and earning information. The Economic Services Administration of the Department of Social and Health Services provided welfare payment data.

A multimethod search strategy was used to find all possible studies related to vocational rehabilitation and traumatic brain injury between the years of 1993 and 2000. Twenty six studies were included. Data extracted from each of the studies included baseline employment percentages for the sample where reported (i.e., pre-injury employment rate), post-injury employment percentages, definitions of return-to-work (i.e., restricted definition pertaining to full-time competitive employment only or inclusive definition pertaining to any employment or productive activity including any competitive work, study, or other functional activity), and follow-up time(s) post-injury. The traditional meta-analytic approach was not applied in this study, as the assumptions of parametric analysis were violated. Specifically, both return-to-work and intervention are intrinsically linked to time, producing non-linear effects and non-independent observations. Rather than employing a single aggregate method as in meta-analysis, quantitative synthesis was conducted using non-linear exponential modeling through the SAS PROC NLIN1 module. To confirm the validity of the non-linear analysis, the results were checked using an approximate permutation test (also through SAS PROC NLIN). The analysis was conducted using follow-up time, return-to-work patterns, and the return-to-work definition (restricted or inclusive) to develop an overall model of unemployment following injury. Non-linear models were constructed to predict unemployment at a given time from all available data points. Comparisons were made by comparing the parameters obtained against parameters computed by random permutation of the relevant covariates thus producing an approximate permutation test of the original estimates. Degrees of freedom were based on the number of studies included in the analysis rather than the number of participants variance estimates could not be derived as a result of biased means and standard deviations (caused by possible right censoring in the data).

Programmatic records were reviewed for each of the four interventions for program completion and employment outcomes. In addition, a 12-month follow-up was conducted of 36 consecutive admissions to the Job Skills Development and Supported Employment Program.

Participants were interviewed at study entry using a computer-assisted personal interview constructed with the Questionnaire Development System. In addition to the interview data, a vocational activities log that included information on vocational services provided and patients vocational outcomes during the period of service was recorded by the vocational counselors. Chi-square tests, t-tests, and logistic regression analyses were used for bivariate analyses. Multiple logistic regression was used for multivariate analysis.