“Other,” “Multi-difficulties,” and “Main”

It is highly recommended that countries should refrain from using the terms “other,” “multi-difficulties” or “main” when referencing alternative unnamed domains. The name of a specific domain is important for answering a policy question. Moreover, multi-difficulties fail at adding useful information.  Since the WG-SS asks each domain separately, it is easy to identify people with difficulties in more than one domain during data analysis and identify which specific difficulties are reported. Adding “other,” “multi difficulties” and “main” may negatively affect the accuracy of prevalence rates.

The countries covered by ESCWA failed to uniformly apply the same WG standards, thus, differences in the implementation of the WG-SS were observed in relation to the coverage of age groups, and the selection of domains. The table below shows that not all countries included all six domains of the short set questions. For cultural reasons, some excluded ‘self-care’, another country excluded the essential domain of ‘cognition’ (remembering/concentrating), while others added ‘upper body’ from the WG extended domains.