Food sufficiency and the utilization of free food resources for working-age Americans with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic

Disability, food insecurity, and nutritional assistance in the context of COVID-19 pandemic: Interrogating the role of perceived everyday discrimination.

“…Utilizing data from a community survey with a sizeable subsample of people with disabilities in the Intermountain West collected in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, we first documented a statistically significant association between self-reported disability and participation in food assistance programs, and we observed that this association was driven by disability-related differences in food insecurity. This finding supports emerging research on the increase in food insecurity associated with the pandemic and its mitigation efforts, and further extends this scholarship by documenting the nutritional challenges that individuals with disabilities have experienced during this period (Brown & Ciciurkaite, 2022; Brucker et al, 2021; Choi et al, 2022; Ciciurkaite et al, 2022; Fitzpatrick et al, 2021). A significant gap remains, however, in our understanding of why people with disabilities and chronic health conditions may struggle to sustain reliable access to food during public health crises and how these challenges may be mitigated.…”

“…This is supported by research on food sufficiency (a concept related to food security) during the pandemic. As an illustration, Brucker et al (2021) demonstrated that between March and September 2020, the proportion of working-age adults who were food sufficient decreased by eight percentage points (65%–57%) among working-aged adults with disabilities, as compared to a decrease of five percentage points (78%–73%) among adults without disabilities.…”

Access to food and health care during the COVID-19 pandemic by disability status in the United States

“… 8 A study conducted in Australia showed that having a disability during the pandemic was associated with food insecurity, 3 and in the U.S., working-age adults with disabilities were more likely to experience food insufficiency than those without disability before the pandemic (in March 2020) and during the pandemic (in September 2020). 13 In this study, we adjust for employment status to examine the impact of having functional disability on food insecurity independent of work limitations. Mobility disability has been previously linked to food insecurity via transportation barriers that may limit access to food stores.…”

“…Weighted percentages of outcomes by disability status were stratified by age due to differential probability of experiencing disability and accessing resources based on age. Poisson regression models with robust variance adjusted for self-reported age, gender, ethnicity, race, marital status, educational attainment, and income, in addition to employment status, household size and presence of children in the household for food insufficiency, 13 , 14 and insurance status for unmet health care needs outcomes, were used to estimate the prevalence ratios of each of these outcomes by disability status in the overall population, and stratified by age. Prevalence ratios were used as they can be more easily interpreted than odds ratios from logistic regression models.…”

Food insecurity in households of children with ASD in COVID-19 pandemic: A comparative analysis with the Household Pulse Survey data using stabilized inverse probability treatment weights

“…Compared to adults without disabilities, a significantly a larger share of working-age adults with disabilities reported sometimes or often not having enough to eat (8.1% versus 16.6% respectively). 4 …”