Measuring physical inclusion of people with developmental disabilities: evaluation of the Macomb-Oakland Regional...

The Macomb-Oakland Regional Center has been facilitating the movement of persons with developmental disabilities into the community for 27 years. To measure randomness of their home locations, we used a geographic-based spatial analytic approach. Involvement of allies in planning futures, number of people with disabilities residing in each home, proportion of earned income, level of disability, and level of mobility were used as explanatory variables. Monte Carlo procedures using Moran's I, a measure of spatial autocorrelation, did not reveal significant clustering of residences. Regression procedures, however, did reveal that earned income was the independent variable that most explained the degree to which people were physically included. People living in smaller homes were more randomly dispersed.