Understanding National, Regional, and Global Priorities for the Social Justice and Economic Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities: Analyzing CRPD State Reports Using Text Mining, NLP, and LLMs

Abstract

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) marks the global transition from a charity-based “medical model” of disability to a rights-based “social justice model”. Currently 191 countries have ratified the CRPD, making them a “State Party”. Understanding State Party priorities for persons with disabilities can be challenging nationally, and especially so globally. Each State Party is required to submit a report on their progress in implementing the treaty. In this study, we conduct a computational text analysis of all available CRPD State Reports (N=170). We ask three main questions of this data using traditional text mining and NLP techniques, and one overarching question using GenerativeAI tools. We find evidence of global CRPD implementation, support for social justice, and economic inclusion for persons with disabilities. We find important regional variation and value in our hybrid data analysis approach that supports civil society engagement in CRPD implementation efforts.