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State information > US Disability Statistics Table From 2002 American Community Survey

US Disability Data Table From the 2002 American Community Survey

Estimates for 2002

An estimated 42,448,000 people in the United States have a disability, or 16.3% of the population age 5 and over. An estimated 6,720,000 people, or 2.6% of the population 5 and over, have difficulty performing self-care activities, also known as Activities of Daily Living, such as dressing, bathing, or getting around inside the home. Read more about these data.

Source: Tabulations by the Center for PAS from the 2002 American Community Survey (ACS).

About the US 2002 ACS Disability Data

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.

View more current and valid disability statistics from the ACS:

• US Disability Data From 2003 American Community Survey
• US Disability Data From 2004 American Community Survey

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