Finding Ways for Disabled People to Participate in Research is Goal of Case Western Reserve University Nursing School Study

Finding Ways for Disabled People to Participate in Research is Goal of Case
Western Reserve University Nursing School Study

CLEVELAND, Oct. 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- While the public has made
accommodations for 54.4 million people with disabilities, many researchers
regularly exclude people who cannot read, hear or write from participating in
their research projects.

That's about to change. The Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing (FPB) at
Case Western Reserve University will develop research tools and strategies to
include individuals with vision and hearing impairments in future research.

Shirley Moore, Edward J. and Louise Mellen Professor of Nursing and director
of the National Institutes of Health-funded Center for Self-Management
Research (SMART Center) at FPB, is the lead investigator for the two-year,
nearly $400,000 National Institute for Nursing Research-funded project, "Full
Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities (FIND) in Self-Management Research."

She will work with co-investigator Ann Williams, National Institute of
Health-supported postdoctoral fellow, who has been working on a health-related
research project with blind diabetics.

Williams' work inspired Moore.

The study is built on the Principles of Universal Design, developed for school
teachers to tailor school work for children with special needs.

FIND will bring together a collaboration of experts from the Cleveland Sight
Center and the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center along with researchers in
engineering, teaching and rehabilitation specialists of persons with
disabilities and communication scientists. The center will also draw from
available technologies at the university's Prevention Research Center and
Behavior Measurement Core Facilities, and from other universities and
self-management centers around the country.

Staff from the sight and hearing centers will conduct a series of workshops
for researchers. During these sessions, researchers will learn about
communication technologies for the blind and hearing impaired that can be used
to gather data for their research projects.

FIND will also establish a demonstration center, the FIND Lab, where tactile,
hearing and other tools to assist participants can be tried and used for
practice by researchers or their assistants gathering the data.

"It is important that we do research representative of the people being
studied," says Moore, citing that 15 percent of diabetics are visually
impaired but regularly barred from participating in research about their
chronic illness because they have problems seeing.

When everyone has a chance to participate, overall research findings will be
more robust and reduce bias in studies, says Moore.

SOURCE Case Western Reserve University

Susan Griffith of Case Western Reserve University, +1-216-368-1004
susan.griffith@case.edu