The School to Work Transition for Adolescents with Disabilities

Dennis Hogan, Brown University
Thomas Wells, Brown University

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), we examine the early transition to adulthood among adolescents with disabilities. The NLSY97 provides an excellent opportunity to investigate the impact of schooling, family background, and community background factors on the transition to adulthood. The set of data also allows the researchers to compare the experiences of adolescents with disabilities to the experiences of adolescents without disabilities. In our analysis, we utilize Bayesian model averaging (BMA), a recently developed methodological technique that identifies the best-fitting regression models and then averages results across these models. The results from the BMA procedure are arguably better than results derived from a single statistical model since they are averaged across a number of models. This is a very useful approach given uncertainty and variation in results that surround any one particular statistical model. We utilize the procedure for each transition considered.