2024 Survey: Hospitality Industry

The 2024 Kessler Foundation National Employment and Disability Survey: Hospitality Industry is a project led by Andrew Houtenville and Shreya Paul funded by Kessler Foundation.

This project focuses on employment practices within the hospitality industry, particularly concerning people with disabilities. The study aims to closely examine hiring, training, accommodation, and retention practices for people with disabilities in the hospitality industry. The goals are to identify successful strategies for employing people with disabilities in the hospitality industry.

2022 Survey: Supervisor Perspectives and Impact of COVID-19  

Kessler Foundation, in partnership with the University of New Hampshire (UNH), conducted the 2022 Kessler Foundation National Employment and Disability Survey: Supervisor Perspectives (2022 KFNEDS:SP2) to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on employment practices as they relate to people with disabilities, to identify the practices used by employers to increase the employment of people with disabilities, and to understand supervisors’ views about the effectiveness of these practices.

Building off the 2017 Kessler Foundation National Employment and Disability Survey: Supervisor Perspectives (2017 KFNEDS:SP) (Kessler Foundation and UNH, 2017), the 2022 KFNEDS:SP2 enables comparisons with supervisor perspectives today and pre-pandemic, capturing the impact of the national lockdown on employer practices and procedures to identify negative and/or positive changes since the original 2017 Supervisor Survey., ...more

2020 Survey: Recent College Graduates

Nearly 30 years ago, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed to prevent discrimination against people with disabilities in education and employment. Individuals with disabilities now comprise about 12 percent of college students, which matters because educational attainment is associated with gainful employment. Although the employment gap between people with and without disabilities persists, employment prospects are favorable for people with disabilities who have college degrees. Yet, research is lacking about the ways college graduates with disabilities successfully navigate barriers and emerging opportunities to find work, nearly 30 years after the ADA. 

The 2020 Kessler Foundation National Employment and Disability Survey: Recent College Graduates (KFNEDS:RCG) addresses this gap in knowledge by researching several key questions. For example, what supports and services were most helpful to recent graduates, both at college and after graduation, during the job search? What kinds of jobs did they find? How did they decide whether or when to disclose their disabilities to employers? What were employers’ attitudes toward them?

2017 Survey: Supervisor Strategies for Inclusion

Many employers fully engage people with disabilities in their workforces by hiring, retaining, and advancing their employees with disabilities.

Developed and conducted by the University of New Hampshire, the 2017 Kessler Foundation National Employment and Disability Survey: Supervisor Perspectives (KFNEDS:SP) identifies ways that employers strive to hire and retain employees with disabilities by utilizing different approaches to successfully avoid or overcome barriers. The KFNEDS:SP used a nationally representative sample of 3,000 supervisors from a variety of sectors and industries across the U.S. Supervisors respond to questions related to (1) employer procedures and policies, (2) practice approaches to employ people with disabilities, and (3) the perceived effectiveness of practices and policies.

2015 Survey: Disability Employment Challenges

The employment gap between people with and without disabilities is well-documented. Research findings point to two main factors that contribute to the persistence of these employment disparities. First, aspects of Social Security policy may unintentionally constrain pathways to full-time employment by prioritizing income-support programs that are not designed to promote sustained workforce participation. Second, long-held employer assumptions about job demands and work capacity can limit employment opportunities for people with disabilities.

The immediate objectives of the survey are to identify:

• Strategies that workers with disabilities and their employers are using and not using to obtain and maintain employment
• Strategies that former-workers with disabilities and their employers used and did not use to obtain and maintain employment and the factors that contributed to their leaving work,
• Barriers faced by job-seekers with disabilities