Cautions in Interpreting Findings

Readers should remember the following issues when interpreting the findings in this report:

• The analyses presented in this report are descriptive; none of the findings should be interpreted as implying causal relationship, nor should differences between disability categories be interpreted as reflecting disability differences alone, because of the confounding of disability and other demographic factors.
  
  
• The report addresses the "self-representations" of youth with disabilities—i.e., how they describe themselves to others. The extent of discrepancy between the perceptions youth report holding and their "true" views is unknown. "Self-representations" as measured by NLTS2 should not be interpreted as objective assessments of abilities.
  
  
• Although discussions in the report emphasize only differences that reach a level of statistical significance of at least p < .01, the large number of comparisons made in this report will result in some apparently significant differences, even at this level, being "false positives"—i.e., Type 1 errors. Readers also are cautioned that the meaningfulness of differences reported here cannot be derived from their statistical significance.