Carli Friedman, PhD
@cf23.bsky.social
Disability Studies Researcher: ableism, intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), health equity, and Medicaid HCBS. She/her. https://carlifriedman.wordpress.com/
Remedying the social isolation of people with IDD is critical for health equity www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
The ‘Social’ in Social Determinants: Relationships and Health of People with IDD - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research Social well-being is a concept that measures how strong our social connections are, in recognition that our social relationships have a widespread impact on...
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Structural and attitudinal barriers to health promotion and preventative care contribute to inequitable encounters and disparate care for disabled people. www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Disabled People’s Experiences with Discrimination in Healthcare: Book Chapter - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research Disabled people have worse health outcomes than nondisabled people. A large part of this is because they receive lower quality healthcare. In fact, ableism and other forms of discrimination are very common within healthcare and produce health inequities for disabled people. For these reasons, in the study described... Read more »
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Throughout history, institutionalization has done immense harm to the disability community. It continues to shape systems and structures today centuries later via structural ableism. www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
The Legacy of Institutionalization on Structural Ableism - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research Structural ableism is when systems, like laws, policies, and social norms, are set up in ways that harm and/or exclude disabled people. These systems did not just appear recently but instead have developed over time and become “normal” because they are so ingrained, resulting in inequities for disabled... Read more »
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78% of social service professionals were implicitly biased against disability. 95% of them didn't even realize it. www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Explicit and Implicit Disability Attitudes of Social Service Professionals - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research Experiencing discrimination from service providers negatively impacts disabled people’s outcomes. That’s one key reason why it’s important to know more abou...
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We need to address transportation barriers to ensure people with IDD are driving where they go, both via transportation itself, and in their lives more broadly www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Fueling Outcomes: Transportation and Quality of Life of People with IDD - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research People with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) face many barriers when it comes to transportation. Unmet transportation needs can hinder comm...
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Many people with disabilities who receive HCBS are still not receiving high quality, person-centered services and supports. To do so, we must truly listen to people who receive services about what they want and need www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Outcomes of People who Receive HCBS: Still Room for Improvement - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research Home- and Community-Based Services (HCBS) play a critically important role in promoting the community integration and quality of life of people with disabil...
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Almost 5 decades since the introduction of person-centered planning, a significant proportion of the service system still operates in a compliance-based custodial model of care, with goals that people with IDD did not choose. www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Choosing Goals Is Extremely Beneficial, So Why Aren’t People Allowed to Choose? - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research Person-centered planning is a way to rethink how services and supports are delivered to ensure they focus on the wants and needs of the person with intellec...
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Social determinants of health are important because they spotlight structural problems that require structural solutions. That's why I believe the DSP workforce should be considered a social determinant of health of people with IDD www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
DSPs as a Social Determinant of Health of People with IDD - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research Direct support professionals (DSPs) play a vital role in helping promote the health, safety, community integration, and quality of life of people with intel...
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Health care services alone cannot remedy poor health. Instead, the roots of health inequities must be unearthed; this includes discrimination within health care. www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Disability Discrimination in Healthcare Is Associated with Increased Emergency Department Use - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research Disabled people visit the emergency department more often than nondisabled people. Visiting the emergency department more frequently can be a sign of unmet ...
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White. Men. That's who most people think of when they picture a disabled person being discriminated against. This has significant implications not only for discrimination but also the ways we conduct research www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Who Do People Think of When They Think About Disability? - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research When we think about groups of people, we often think about the most ‘typical’ member of that group, called a prototype. For example, when asked to think abo...
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When providers discriminate, disabled people are more likely to delay and forgo medical care. Health care providers’ duty of care means not creating situations in which people forgo needed care and, thus, suffer negative health impacts as a result. www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Discriminatory Provider Behaviors Contribute to Disabled People Delaying and Forgoing Medical Care - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research, & Laura VanPuymbrouck, Rush University Associate Professor Discrimination is a social determinant of health – a condition in the environments we live, work...
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Health care professionals with worse attitudes about disabled people were more likely to think people with IDD were difficult and had challenging behaviors. Assumptions about quality of life were associated with implicit bias about disabled people of color specifically www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Difficult, Challenging, and Worse Quality of Life: Health Care Professionals' Beliefs about People with IDD - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research Health care professionals’ knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes contribute to the ways they provide services and supports to people with intellectual and devel...
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Measuring quality of life outcomes in Medicaid HCBS is important because it can help tell us about the quality of services people receive, as well as larger structural patterns and trends. www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Disparities in Quality of Life and Quality of Supports in HCBS - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research Medicaid Home- and Community-Based Services (HCBS) is a critical funding mechanism that helps people with disabilities receive the services and supports the...
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While interventions often focus on only diet and exercise, social determinants of health play more of a role in people with IDD's weight than commonly recognized! This includes the harmful impact of weight bias. www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Feeding Bias: Rethinking the Weight of People with IDD and Social Determinants of Health - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research A lot of attention is paid to the fact that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are more likely to be fat[1] than people without disabilities and trying to reduce their weight. Professionals almost exclusively recommend changing diet and increasing exercise as the only intervention (Cobbaert &... Read more »
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Miss our webinar about ableism, racism, and intersectionality? You can view the recording here youtu.be/Qtf-jtJ1WQY?...
Ableism, Racism, And Intersectionality, And Their Implications For Health Care
YouTube video by TheCQL
youtu.be
Health care professionals implicitly preferred nondisabled and disabled white people the most, and disabled and nondisabled people of color the least. They also significantly underestimated these attitudes. www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Intersectional Disability and Race Biases of Health Care Professionals - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research Health care professionals can directly and indirectly impact the outcomes of disabled people. In fact, their biases can result in them providing lower quali...
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Join Chester Finn and I for a free webinar about ableism, racism, and intersectionality! www.c-q-l.org/resources/we...
Ableism, Racism, And Intersectionality, And Their Implications For Health Care - The Council on Quality and Leadership
Learn about the intersectionality of ableism and racism, including how attitudes affect disabled people in everyday life.
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In this new research, we found students often wanted to become occupational therapists to help people, but many also had problematic views of disability and power dynamics. www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Why Do People Become Occupational Therapists? - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research Occupational therapy can play an important role in helping promote the independence and integration of people with disabilities, older adults, and others. U...
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Without attending to intersectionality, we will never truly be able to dismantle oppression and discrimination, including the ableism disabled people face. This new tool is a way to measure intersecting explicit attitudes www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
The Symbolic Intersecting Ableism and Racism Scale: A New Way to Examine Explicit Attitudes - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research Disabled people of color do not necessarily experience ableism the same way as white disabled people. Just like disabled people of color do not necessarily ...
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While traditional implicit association tests (IATs) reveal most people are biased against disabled people, after developing a new intersectional measure, I found this bias may largely come from attitudes about disabled people of color specifically. www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Introducing the Intersecting Disability and Race Attitudes Implicit Association Test (IDRA-IAT) - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research The concept intersectionality is a way to help us understand how different forms of oppression intersect and interact, impacting people with multiple margin...
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Are you a Black graduate student studying disability? Our call for 2025 research mentorship students is now open! www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
2025 Disability Research Mentorship Program for Black Graduate Students - The Council on Quality and Leadership
In 2020, CQL created the Disability Research Mentorship Program for Black Graduate Students in recognition that academic/research job candidates are judged on their history of publications and present...
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When we listen to autistic people about what they want, and support them in the ways they need, autistic people have better lives. Seems obvious but there's still so much more work to do! www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Autistic People’s Quality of Life Hindered by Low Quality Support, Not their Needs - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research A lot more research about autistic people has focused on diagnosis and biology than autistic people’s quality of life. In addition, a lot of research about ...
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Research indicates giving people with IDD more control over their lives and services works - promotes choice and outcomes. So why then is the national goal for self-direction in Medicaid HCBS only 13% of people with IDD? Low expectations? New research about self-direction across the nation:
States Aim to Only Have 13% of People with IDD Self-Direct HCBS - The Council on Quality and Leadership
Self-direction is a service delivery method that allows people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) to control the services they receive, often including where money is spent and to ...
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AI may be the hot new trend, but as we find in our new research it doesn't meet quality research standards AND it's ableist. Free journal article available in the summary: www.c-q-l.org/resources/ar...
Ethical and Quality Concerns About AI for Disability Research - The Council on Quality and Leadership
By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research It often feels like you can’t go anywhere without hearing about artificial intelligence (AI), including large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, these day...
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