The Child Functioning Module

The WG-SS is successful in identifying children with functional difficulties. However, as previously mentioned, the questions are unsuitable for children who are under 5 years of age, and it fails to identify many children with developmental disabilities. The WG determined, therefore, that a special set of questions that is devoted to measuring child functioning was needed to address the aspects of child development that were not being addressed by the WG-SS. 

The WG, in partnership with UNICEF, developed the Child Functioning Module, a set of survey questions for identifying children with disabilities, of which the rationale and principles can be found on the WG website (http://www.washingtongroup-disability.com ).

Furthermore, the CFM can be a component of national population surveys or used as survey supplements on specific topics of interest. As with other WG question sets, disability is defined as “difficulty undertaking basic activities,” and therefore, the work draws upon the previously developed WG question sets for adults.

As stated on the WG website, the CFM has been designed to tackle the following:

• Expand the functional domains for children: The distribution of disability types is different for children than that of adults, whose major problems (especially in advancing years) are mobility, sensory and cognition (remembering/concentrating). However, the main disabilities found in children are related to intellectual functioning, affect and behavior.
• Incorporate a fuller age range: The reference age for the CFM is between 2 and 17 years. The workgroup decided it was unfeasible to capture disabilities among children under 2 years of age through population surveys. Furthermore, there are different sets of questions for children between the ages of 2 and 4 and those between the ages of 5 and 17.
• Recognize the range of disability: Answer categories were designed to reflect the continuum of functional difficulties with the ability to determine appropriate cut-offs based on the requirements for the disability data collection.
• Identify age-appropriate difficulties: For reference and to focus the respondent on the functioning of their own child regarding that child’s cohort, where appropriate, questions are prefaced with the clause: “Compared with children of the same age…”.
• Rely on proxy respondents: Due to the standard methodology of survey administration, the ethical considerations of interviewing children, and the inability of young children to answer these types of questions reliably, the questions were designed to be administered to the child’s parent or primary caregiver.
• Preserve international comparability: The aim of the questions is to provide comparable data cross-nationally.
• Follow rigorous standards of development: Questions were designed in consultation with a wide range of experts. This included survey statisticians, pediatricians, developmental psychologists, speech therapists etc. Questions were then validated through cognitive and field testing, following established WG procedures.

The full Module on Child Functioning for children between 2 and 4 years of age and between 5 and 17 years of age can be found in the Module on Child Functioning, Ages 2-4 and the Module on Child Functioning, Ages 5-17.