Topic > Major Ethical Issues Related to Disabilities

An issue of growing concern facing rehabilitation professionals today concerns transition services. Specifically, young adults experience a transition from secondary education to the workforce or post-secondary education and potentially another transition from post-secondary education to the workforce. For people with disabilities, these transitions can become more arduous and complex depending on the breadth and depth of adaptations that a given individual requires to function at a high level in their environment. To make the transition as smooth as possible, several services may need to coordinate their efforts, including the secondary school system, vocational rehabilitation, college and university services, employers, counsellors, psychologists and medical professionals and rehabilitation. However, this collaboration does not always happen in a systematic and effective way. Indeed, ethical guidelines for counselors and psychologists suggest close collaboration with other professionals to ensure continuity of services during these transitions, however in many cases this does not occur (Corrigan, 1998). Much effort is made in the transition literature to understand transitions from secondary education to work for people with disabilities, while empirical investigation of the transition from postsecondary to work remains nascent but underdeveloped (Fichten et al., 2012). . In a study examining the experiences of postsecondary graduates with disabilities transitioning, Fichten and colleagues (2012) found that, while there was little difference in the employment rate between graduates with and without disabilities, graduates with disabilities were employed less often in a job related to… half of the job… period after graduation. At this stage, issues related to disability disclosure become paramount. According to Gillies (2012), disability disclosure during job interviews is a case-by-case situation in which the person with a disability tends to evaluate how their disability may influence how they are perceived by the employer and their function. working. If the applicant determines that their disability is not relevant or necessary to disclose, they do not disclose it. For people with apparent disabilities or those who need accommodations to do their jobs, there is the issue of when to disclose. In Gillies' (2012) qualitative study of 10 graduates transitioning into the workforce, participants described their search for meaningful employment, their experience of discrimination, their concerns about disclosure, and how the transition influenced their construction of their identity.