Mapping Disability Co-Occurrence Among Students at Four-Year Institutions

• In Event: Navigating College Networks: Engagement, Belonging, and Resource Access for Diverse Student Populations

Abstract

Despite calls for data disaggregation among disability measures, researchers in higher education have yet to explore the prevalence, the clustering, and the engagement of students with multiple disabilities. Using new disability measures, data from the 2021 and 2022 National Survey of Student Engagement were examined among the 55,547 undergraduate disabled students. Guided by critical realism and student engagement, aggregation technique, Spearman correlation and TwoStep cluster analysis, and One-Way ANOVA testing revealed that a majority of disabled students report more than one disability (73.6%) with correlations and clustering centering anxiety and depression. All engagement differences between the three clusters of multiple disabilities were statistically significantly different; however, only the magnitude of differences in Sense of Belonging held a non-trivial effect size.

Author

• John Zilvinskis, Binghamton University - SUNY