For many people with spinal cord injury, seeking employment after injury is an important goal. There are services available to help people with disabilities. However, the best ways to coordinate and deliver these services are not yet known. This project will compare two ways of coordinating and delivering services that are designed to help people with spinal cord injury obtain employment.

Employment is important for financial security, social connection, and life satisfaction. Unfortunately, rates of unemployment remain high among people with spinal cord injury (SCI). To help address this challenge, the Northern New Jersey Spinal Cord Injury System (NNJSCIS) is conducting a single-site, randomized, controlled trial to compare two programs intended to increase rates of employment among people with SCI. The project will enroll 162 recently injured adults with SCI who are interested in becoming employed or returning to work and will compare different ways of delivering employment-related services in the first year after injury. Services will begin in inpatient rehabilitation and may include education, therapy, equipment provision, counseling, and other interventions. Information about employment status, earnings, community participation, and health will be collected through a combination of questionnaires and databases. Participants and service providers will also share their impressions of the programs via survey and focus groups. Analyses will examine the rate of participants employed at 1 year in each group, time to employment, earnings, community participation, and other aspects of well-being. Findings from this study will be used to determine which ways of delivering services are most effective in enabling employment by 1 year after injury, and to provide information to help other rehabilitation centers adopt effective programs.

Inclusion Criteria:

• adults age 18 to 62
• a neurological impairment secondary to an SCI that occurred less than 12 months prior to enrollment
• receiving inpatient rehabilitation at Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation (KIR)
• community living in the state of NJ after discharge from KIR
• have a goal to pursue competitive integrated employment or education/retraining leading to competitive integrated employment

All individual participant data (IPD), except if/when limited by data use agreements established with the New Jersey Department of Labor, will be shared via the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the preferred data repository for the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. Data shared via ICPSR will include data from measures collected at baseline and follow-ups for purposes of sample characterization and/or outcomes assessment. All data will be de-identified and labeled with subject identification numbers established for the study rather than names or initials.

Data will be made available within 6-12 months of the completion of the study and will remain available indefinitely.

Requests for data access will be coordinated through the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) according to their established procedures.