Comparing estimates of disability prevalence using federal and international disability measures in national surveillance

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

“…This difference may result in the identification of somewhat different populations. Previous research using data from the 2010 and 2013-2015 NHIS found that both measures generally identify the population with disability with similar distributions of demographic characteristics; however, the prevalence of disability is higher for the ACS measure compared with the WG measure (13).…”

Food insecurity among those with disability: Cross‐survey comparison of estimates and implications for future research

“…For the purposes of this analysis, we included both approaches, though we excluded the communication WGSS item to maximize comparability (see Table 2). prior research using the NHIS has shown that the WGSS results in lower levels of disability prevalence compared to the 6QS, comparisons across demographic groups demonstrate that the pattern is consistent and that no demographic group has biased estimates of disability prevalence (Lauer et al, 2019).…”

“…Although some questions explicitly exclude young children (e.g., ambulation and independent living), some children likely are included in these estimates. While this may result in a slightly higher rate of disability prevalence for these samples and may create more variation in household‐level food security, the rate of childhood disability using the 6QS in the 2018 American Community Survey is very low (0.7% for children under age 5 and 5.5% for children age 5–17) (Lauer et al, 2019).…”

“…The 6QS has an additional question about difficulty with independent living and the WGSS has a question about difficulty with communication. One other difference between the two is that the 6QS asks direct yes/no questions and the WGSS asks respondents to rate difficulty on a four-level scale from "no difficulty" to" cannot do" (Lauer et al, 2019). Three of the studies included here (CPS, NHANES, and AHS) use the 6QS.…”

Americans Aging with Disabilities Are More Likely to Have Multiple Chronic Conditions

“…The NHIS is a cross-sectional survey utilizing self-report and affirmative and negative responses to disability questions are affected by survey design effects, question phrasing, response type/categorization, and question locations within the survey (Lauer et al, 2019; Lauer & Houtenville, 2018). Several biases may affect the results in this study, including, but not limited to, selection bias, observation bias, response bias, recall bias, and nonresponse bias.…”