Dalton Stevens, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy.
As a disabled sociologist, Dalton is interested in how social life influences human lives and agency, focusing on disabled people's experiences. His research seeks to understand how policies shape disabled people's experiences across the life course in several domains—education, employment, housing, marriage, parenthood, community, health, and mortality. He earned his PhD in sociology at Syracuse University and defended his dissertation, titled "Adulting While Disabled," in the spring of 2023. The research uses 29 life history interviews to understand how individual, interpersonal, organizational, community, and societal factors shape disabled Millennials' transitions to adulthood. It sheds light on needed changes regarding IDEA, Vocational Rehabilitation, ADA, Medicaid, and Medicare to improve disabled adults' outcomes in adulthood. His prior qualitative, quantitative, and theoretically focused research has appeared in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Annals of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, Preventive Medicine Reports, Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, and Disability Health Journal, along with other journals and book series.