Scott Landes, associate professor of sociology, has received the Excellence in Research Award in the annual IPUMS competition. He received the award for his co-authored paper, “Counting Disability in the National Health Interview Survey and its Consequence: Comparing the American Community Survey to the Washington Group Disability Measures.”

Landes and contributing authors used data from the 2011-12 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) in which respondents reported disability status via both the American Community Survey disability question set and Washington Group question set. The authors found that the Washington set—the questions adopted by the NHIS as the sole measure of disability status— significantly undercounts disabled people and overestimates their mortality risk. The American Community Survey question set, with added questions, would be a better base for the NHIS to monitor the health of the disabled population in the U.S., they conclude.

Co-authors included Bonnielin Swenor, founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Disability Health Research Center, and Nastassia Vaitsiakhovich, a sociology Ph.D. candidate at Maxwell. 

The IPUMS research awards honor outstanding research that uses IPUMS data to explore social and demographic processes. IPUMS originally stood for Integrated Public Use Microdata Series and is housed at the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation at the University of Minnesota. It is the world’s largest individual-level population database, consisting of microdata samples from the U.S. and international census records, as well as data from U.S. and international surveys. The records are converted into a consistent format and made available to researchers through a web-based data dissemination and analysis system.

Landes has authored numerous articles, commentaries and research briefs on the measurement of disability, health and mortality trends for disabled adults; morbidity and mortality trends for military veterans; and the intersection of disability and social theory. His research has been funded by the National Institute on Aging as well as the Maxwell Tenth Decade Project, the Collaboration for Unprecedented Success and Excellence (CUSE) Grant Program, the Appleby-Mosher Award and the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and Population Health, where he is currently a research affiliate.

Landes is a faculty associate at the Aging Studies Institute and a research affiliate at the Center for Aging and Policy Studies. He is also an O’Hanley Faculty Scholar, which recognizes outstanding teaching, scholarship, service and success with external grant support. His areas of expertise are in sociology of disability, medical sociology, aging and the life course, and military veterans. 

By Michael Kelly