Alignment between the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the National Core Indicators Adult Consumer Survey

On December 13, 2006, after over two decades of advocacy efforts, the United Nations adopted the Convention on Rights on Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). More than 150 countries have ratified or at least signed this international convention, to date. An important component of CRPD implementation is a systematic effort to evaluate whether and what extent the rights as stated in the CRPD are being upheld by individual countries. The purpose of this paper was to contribute to a U.S. and international discussion about monitoring the rights of persons with disabilities as codified by the CRPD by examining the potential use of the National Core Indicators Adult Consumer Survey (NCI-ACS) for this purpose. The NCI-ACS collects annual quality outcome data from over 13 000 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in 46 U.S. states. A crosswalk between the CRPD Articles and the 2013–14 NCI-ACS was conducted to map the survey questions onto the CRPD. Forty-seven variables from the NCI-ACS focused on different aspects of disability rights were identified as related to 12 CRPD Articles, suggesting a moderate overlap between the NCI-ACS and the CRPD. Next steps are discussed.