Number of People in the United States Experiencing Ambulatory and Independent Living Difficulties

Estimating the characteristics of the “disabled” population is necessary for some governments and of interest to health researchers concerned with producing disability prevalence rates. Because generating easy-to-understand estimates of disability in the population is important, this article provides U.S. population estimates for two disability-related measures by using the 2009 to 2011 American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample file. The number of people who have “independent living” and “ambulatory” difficulties is calculated from a sample of 9,204,437 (representing >309 million people). The percentage for “disabled” is found to vary by racial and ethnic category, sex, age, citizenship status, educational attainment, and state-level regions divided by weather.