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Ohio
Disability Statistics 
Statistics from the 2002 American Community Survey (ACS)
The Center for Personal Assistance Services has compiled state and national
data on the prevalence of overall disability and of self-care difficulty,
by gender, age, race and ethnicity, type of disability, family income,
benefit recipiency, employment status, and living arrangement. These statistics
are based on our tabulations of public use data sets from the 2002 American
Community Survey (ACS), containing information on over 1 million residents
of randomly selected U.S. households. Because it is a household survey,
people living in institutions such as nursing homes are not included.
The 2002 ACS offers two significant advantages over disability estimates
obtained from the 2000 Census. An obvious advantage is that the data are
more recent. More importantly, major problems have been discovered in
the responses to two of the six disability questions from the 2000 Census
long form, due largely to the procedures for collecting data on households
that failed to respond to the paper questionnaire. Although the ACS questionnaire
features the same six disability items, the survey's procedures for handling
survey non-response are different and do not appear to be affected by
the same problems. We therefore believe that the ACS estimates of disability
rates, though considerably lower than those from the 2000 Census, are
far more reliable and should be strongly preferred over those obtained
from the 2000 Census, especially for working-age adults.
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