Graduate Researchers in Georgia State’s iCORD Lab Uncover Housing Risks Facing Disabled Veterans

ATLANTA - A new study by Georgia State University sociologists has found that disabled veterans face distinctly higher risks of poor housing than both their non-disabled veteran counterparts and disabled non-veterans.

The findings were published in Cityscape, a journal of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Madelief Tilder (B.A. '24, M.A. '26) was a Georgia State graduate research assistant working at the Shepherd Center when she began exploring the numbers in federal disability data. The Shepherd Center is a nonprofit hospital treating spinal cord, brain injuries and other complex conditions.

Sifting through the statistics, Tilder noticed something: Year after year, veterans with disabilities were more likely than civilians with disabilities or veterans without disabilities to be living in homes with serious problems - overcrowding, no working plumbing, no kitchen and housing costs eating up more than 30 percent of their income.

Tilder brought her findings back to Georgia State's Interdisciplinary Community Research on Disability Lab - known as the iCORD Lab - housed in the Department of Sociology.

The team wanted to know whether the disparity could be explained away by resource availability - whether disabled veterans simply fared worse in states with fewer services. To start, they investigated what resources exist for veterans in each state: Veterans Affairs hospitals, outpatient clinics, veterans centers, military bases and military colleges.

"There was no single list we could access, and some of the lists we found were contradictory," said Daniel Pasciuti, an associate professor of sociology at Georgia State and the study's lead author.

So, the students built it themselves.

Lauren Leeder (B.A. '23, M.A. '26) was an undergraduate student when they walked up to Pasciuti and asked to sit in on his research meetings.

"I told him I wanted to learn how to do research," Leeder said. "I started helping out, and that showed me research could actually be a viable career path."

Leeder and the team pulled the data for healthcare facilities directly from the Department of Veterans Affairs Open Data Portal and grabbed military base counts from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Counting the military colleges, however, required a lot more legwork. The team had to construct the database from the ground up - searching websites and public records, one by one, campus by campus, to weed out satellite locations, because counting them may have inflated how many resources a state appeared to have.

Leeder then helped put every state on the same scale - counting how many of each resource existed for every 10,000 veterans who lived there. It was the only way to compare a small state like Vermont to a large one like Texas.

Leeder, now a doctoral student, calls this their first real experience building a dataset from scratch.

"Before this project, I didn't have much grounding in data wrangling or measuring proxies," Leeder said, "and those skills are a big part of what led me to finish my thesis on time."

That work is why Pasciuti argues disabled veterans need to be studied as their own group, not folded into the other two.

"You can't just place them with veterans, and you can't just place them with other disabled persons when looking at housing and housing policy in the U.S.," Pasciuti said.

Other findings were less expected. Homeownership usually protects people from poor housing, but it didn't for disabled veterans. And states with more vet centers per veteran showed worse housing outcomes in the models, a result that surprised the researchers.

The iCORD Lab, cofounded by Raeda Anderson, a research scientist at Shepherd Center and affiliate sociology professor at Georgia State, was built for exactly this kind of research.

"The partnership between the Georgia State University Department of Sociology and Shepherd Center has been highly productive and has maintained a clear and consistent focus on improving opportunities for individuals with disabilities to thrive within their communities," Anderson said.

That collaboration comes to life through a project Georgia State calls the domestic field school - a weekly class where Shepherd Center researchers travel to campus to work alongside Georgia State students and faculty, treating an active research project like a shared assignment.

Pat Barrett, who earned a graduate certificate in gerontology from Georgia State in 2022, is one of those researchers now working at Shepherd.

They helped fix errors and adjust values in five-year American Community Survey data, ran analyses and sat down with the iCORD research team, week after week, to argue over what the numbers meant and what to test next.

"Even after leaving GSU, I still interact with many of the faculty I worked with as a student," Barrett said. "Now, my early mentors have become coauthors and colleagues."

For Tilder, working alongside people with disabilities and the professionals who support them meant she wasn't just reading these outcomes in the literature.

"I understood the realities behind the numbers, and that shaped how I understood what our data was describing," she said.

- Story by André Walker