Disabled People Needed for Employment Study
- 25 Jul 06, 1:05 PM
Nadine Geddes, a researcher at Loughborough University, is hoping to produce an on-line system which will help disabled people find work more easily: .
To this end, she's looking for disabled people who are currently in work and who are willing to be interviewed about:
"who they spoke to when looking for a job; who helped them out; if they had to find information themselves or if it was given to them. I would also like to know if they feel their working environment caters for their needs. Knowing that disabled people have difficulties finding a job is not enough. We need to know what these difficulties are and then do something about them. That is the long-term aim of this study."
If you volunteer to take part in the study, you'll be asked to take part in a 40 minute telephone interview. If you're interested, you can contact Nadine by phone on 01509 226903 or email her at N.L.Geddes@lboro.ac.uk.
Comments
Yet another research on the barriers to finding employment by disabled people? There is a plethora of existing research available on which action has not been taken. I myself co-authored a report into barriers to employment for disabled people in Wales publisheed by RNIB Cymru in 2002. It's a clear qualitative study of what's wrong. Yet, the same questions are being asked over and over again, and more money is being secured for more research. We know what's wrong: our work ethics. I am not saying this to discourage the researcher: her work may well be of enormous value. I wish, however, to register an observation as a totally blind person in self-employment and as a researcher. In the process of looking through the existing research for my 2002 research, I saw report after report whose recommendations had not been acted upon and may not have been acted upon to date.
I think the researcher may be coming at the issues from the wrong angle. The pertinent questions to my mind are not about how a few disabled people have managed to get their current employment. More useful answers are perhaps to be found in triangulating the research, by focusing on those employers who still are not investing in a diverse workforce across all levels - despite happily saying the correct words in public - and at the very same time as avoiding genuine ethical practice. How about a survey of employers' policies versus actual practice and an investigation into the causes of the probable gap? And if Simon Cavendish is correct, then why haven't previous recommendations been acted upon? That鈥檚 where 'these difficulties are'.
why did you delete my comment...?