Disability Definitions

A user guide from the Office for Disability Issues

 

Currently surveys across government use different wording to define disability, so they cover different populations, resulting in different statistics on numbers of disabled people and exclusion of certain groups who may have rights under the Disabiltity Discrimination Act (DDA). Furthermore, current survey questions often adopt a medical model approach to defining disability, without considering the social barriers that restrict people’s life opportunities.

ODI and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) are developing a new draft set of questions to address these issues. This includes developing questions from a social model perspective by identifying questions to measure disability status in terms of the social barriers faced by people with health conditions or impairments. It also includes developing questions so that the number of people classified as disabled under the DDA can also be captured. Adopting the same questions on different surveys will enable data on outcomes for disabled people to be more easily compared and provide a more consistent evidence base across government.

ODI commissioned Independent Social Research (ISR) to cognitively test the draft suite. This assessed how people with a range of impairments understood and responded to the questions and gave recommendations for revision.

ODI and ONS have continued to consult other government departments and disabled people on how to take forward recommendations from this report and revise the questions. It is anticipated that a recommended set of standard disability questions will be available on this website before the end of 2010.

 

Page last reviewed: 03 March 2010