The WG Approach to Identifying Persons with Disabilities

The WG has developed, tested and implemented methodologies for the collection and analysis of disability data, and has investigated ways to best identify persons with disability.  For reporting and generating internationally comparable data purposes, the WG-SS approach identifies persons as having a disability if they have difficulty in undertaking at least one basic activity in core functional domains: vision, hearing, mobility, remembering/concentrating, communicating or self-care. The exact questions used to identify such persons are discussed in the next chapter.

The reason behind this approach is to identify persons who have significant difficulties in basic activities arising from impairments that put them at risk of participation restrictions. The nature of those impairments is not important for identifying someone with a disability. For example, they may not be able to walk because they are paralyzed, missing a leg, have a serious heart condition, are very frail, have a middle ear problem that affects balance or some other reason. What is important is that they have difficulties that could – in an unaccommodating environment – prevent them from participating in society to the same extent as able-bodied persons, in terms of education, employment, raising a family or participating in civic events, among others.

While CRPD addresses the rights of persons with disabilities, functional limitations exist along a continuum. Taking the ability to walk as an example, some people have no difficulties, some have a little difficulty, some a little more, some quite a lot, and some are unable to walk at all.  Given that functioning (and disability) are continuous, the analytic challenge is how to identify a group with and without disabilities. While the WG has recommendations for creating the dichotomy between people with and without disabilities, the questions can also be used to place people along a continuum for more extensive analysis.

Estimates of disability prevalence and the impacts of disability have often not been comparable in the past because different definitions of disability, different cutoffs and different data collection methodologies were used. For these reasons, national studies show large variations in reported prevalence rates of disability ranging from 0.2 to 20.9 per cent.  These differences could even arise within a single country using estimates produced by different agencies.

Thus, the WG questions have been designed to have a transparent, standard approach for making estimates that are comparable across countries and time. The concepts and strategies behind the WG approach are explained in the next two chapters.