Disability Compliance Bulletin, January 18, 2007, Vol 33, No. 9 (Thursday)

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Disability Compliance Bulletin

January 18, 2007

SECTION: Vol. 33 No. 9

HEADLINE: Cornell center scores grant of $5.5 million to study disability services

BODY:

Efforts to find and implement ways to improve the employment and living conditions of people with disabilities are about to be enhanced through a research program financed by a grant of $5.5 million over five years from the Department of Education.

The challenge, said project director Tony Ruiz-Quintanilla, is not only to do the research, but then to meld it into "the concrete daily application." The research must be translated so it answers the question, "What does this do for me?"

Ruiz-Quintanilla heads the Disability and Business Technical Assistance Center-Northeast ADA Center at Cornell University. The center, one of 10 such facilities located across the country, was established because "it wasn't just good enough to put in place a new law ... you have to have some kind of resource for the public to get information on their rights and to help people understand what the responsibilities are for different parties," Ruiz-Quintanilla said.

The center receives calls from employers who want to hire persons with disabilities, but aren't sure of the law or what might be entailed, or who have mentally challenged employees and need advice on how to interface with them.

"We are currently working with the New York State Department of Corrections, trying to improve their emergency evacuation plans," he said. "There are some people with disabilities in prison, and according to the law, you have to be prepared for an emergency, so we are helping."

The grant, worth about $1.1 million annually, will take the center to a new level, Ruiz-Quintanilla said. It stemmed from a decision by the ED's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research to determine if current practices by the 10 centers, now in operation for more than 15 years, go far enough.

The NIDRR people decided "we probably need to rethink what we are doing," he said. "[The feeling was that] it is probably not good enough any more to just do the training and the technical assistance and to distribute materials, but that we should think more about how efficient is what we are doing and what is actually working and what is not," he said.

The NIDRR decision was in line with the government's move toward an evidence-based approach, he said, leading the ED to look for more emphasis on research and evaluation to determine the how and why of what works to meet facility goals.

To move into research, the center needed a researcher, which is why Ruiz-Quintanilla, who led the team that wrote the grant application, took over as director and chief investigator for the center in October 2006. An industrial psychologist with a strong background in research, Ruiz-Quintanilla had previously worked at Cornell's EDI.

He said the center's challenge is twofold: to develop research and come up with questions that are acceptable to the "high standards" of the academic community, then use the answers to for practical application "that has an immediate relevance for the public." One problem is that in general practice, people don't ask in a "systematic" way if they're doing a good job; another is that research has to be translated to mean something to "the person who is doing the training or answering the phone."

"We have to apply the consequence of the research, or people will say, 'So what?'"

Ruiz-Quintanilla said the center will not duplicate existing good research, but rather use the experience of daily practice to find questions that can be answered by research.

"Most research doesn't come out of practice, it comes out of someone's academic mind," he said, noting that good practice and good research already exist, but "they don't talk to each other ... they are kind of separated."

One approach might be to look closely at training practices, which in general are related to knowledge distribution, telling people what the ADA looks like, and what are good practices in handling ADA issues. "We need to screen what we have been doing for the past 15 years to see what needs to be improved and what questions have to be answered if we are going to improve," he said.

"We could ask, is it good enough to distribute knowledge if you really want [the public] to change their behavior towards people with disabilities, or do you need to do something in addition," Ruiz-Quintanilla said. "And if so, what is that addition?"

For more information, see the DBTAC-Northeast Web site at www.ilr.cornell.edu/ped/northeastad, or contact Ruiz-Quintanilla at (607) 255-2132, e-mail to: sr18@cornell.edu.