News by Subject Social & Behavior

What The Study Did: Among the few New York state public school districts providing full-time in-person elementary school instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, most districts served predominately white students, rural/suburban students and children who were not disadvantaged (children who were not from a low-income family, were not English language learners, did not have homelessness, and did not have a disability).

The Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation (JVR) announces publication of an openly available special issue that provides free access to key presentations from the 2020 Virtual Conference of the Association of People Supporting Employment First (APSE). These contributions advocate for and help facilitate the full inclusion of people with disabilities in the workplace and community.

A new analysis called an evidence and gap map, published in published in the journal Campbell Systematic Reviews, has mapped what we know about improving the functional ability of older adults living at home or in nursing homes, retirement homes, or other long-term care facilities.

In women in their mid-40s to early 50s, endometriosis--a condition in which tissue that normally lines the uterus grows outside the uterus--was linked with poor work ability and more sick days, but not with unemployment or early retirement.

Researchers analyzed responses to an open-ended question about employment in the 2015 Kessler Foundation National Employment and Disability Survey, focusing on 1,254 respondents with disabilities who self-identified as unemployed. The most common reasons related to their perceptions about their medical conditions, functional limitations, or disability, which contributed to concerns about being able to work. Countering negative perceptions, which are often associated with diverse demographic and sociodemographic characteristics, is essential to developing successful return-to-work interventions.

The adult brain is more malleable than previously thought, according to researchers from IDC Herzliya. They trained a 50-year-old man, blind from birth, to "see" by ear, and found that neural circuits in his brain formed so-called topographic maps - a brain organization previously thought to emerge only in infancy. This finding, reported in Neuroimage, sheds new light on the brain's ability for change and holds promise to restore lost functions, for example, after a stroke

Researchers have discovered that, in an attempt to adapt to impairments from stroke, muscles lose sarcomeres -- their smallest, most basic building blocks. The team hopes this discovery can help improve rehabilitation techniques to rebuild sarcomeres, ultimately helping to ease muscle tightening and shortening.