Measuring Disability: An Examination of Differences Between the Washington Group Short Set on Functioning and the American Community Survey Disability Questions

Details

• Personal Author:
  Weeks, Julie D. ; Dahlhamer, James M. ; Madans, Jennifer H. ; Maitland, Aaron
• Description:
  Objective―This report examines differences in survey reports of disability between two sets of disability questions, the Short Set on Functioning (WG-SS) developed by the Washington Group on Disability Statistics (WG) and a set of disability questions developed for the American Community Survey (ACS). ; Methods―Data from the 2011-2012 National Health Interview Survey were used to examine agreement between the WG-SS and ACS measures. One difference between the question sets is the ACS questions have dichotomous "yes" or "no" responses while the WG-SS questions have four answer categories reflecting a continuum of difficulty. Unweighted prevalence estimates of disability and odds ratios are presented for the subset of respondents who provided self-reports to both sets to understand the level of agreement and investigate differences between the two. ; Results―Approximately twice as many adults were identified as having disability by the ACS measure compared with the WG-SS measure. This result holds across all subgroups examined. Given the high percentage of respondents reporting no difficulty on both question sets, nonagreement between the two measures is generally low. A variety of sociodemographic and health factors contributed to the observed discordance. While responses of "a lot of difficulty" or "cannot do at all" to the WG-SS questions are highly concordant with "yes" responses to the ACS questions, WG-SS respondents answering "some difficulty" are more likely to have provided "yes" responses to the ACS questions. As a result, the population with disability defined by the ACS questions is more heterogenous in functional level than that defined by the WG-SS questions. ; Conclusion―The ACS disability measure identifies a higher percentage of respondents with disability than the WG-SS measure, yet overall agreement between the two measures is high. The WG-SS ordinal response categories allow for an examination of disability severity, which is useful in describing the full continuum of functioning. ; Suggested citation: Weeks JD, Dahlhamer JM, Madans JH, Maitland A. Measuring disability: An examination of differences between the Washington Group Short Set on Functioning and the American Community Survey disability questions. National Health Statistics Reports; no 161. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2021. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.15620/cdc:107202. ; CS325119 ; nhsr161-508.pdf
• Series:
  National Health Statistics Reports
• Document Type:
  Text
• Genre:
  Report ; Statistics
• Place as Subject:
  United States
• CIO:
  National Center for Health Statistics (U.S.)
• Pages in Document:
  19 Pages
• Issue:
  161
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/107202/cdc_107202_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 496.00 KB]
• Collection(s):
  National Center for Health Statistics
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:28d1389f678576d39a472d0e1dfc80d0ba8af6723920a55b6d3c820dcecb469f20dd91535549b077d3527e1b64c24a1fd368f0f9efd08f63c2ab1dc7c0356e54