Which Environmental Factors Have the Highest Impact on the Performance of People Experiencing Difficulties in Capacity?

Abstract

Disability is understood by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the outcome of the interaction between a health condition and personal and environmental factors. Comprehensive data about environmental factors is therefore essential to understand and influence disability. We aimed to identify which environmental factors have the highest impact on the performance of people with mild, moderate and severe difficulties in capacity, who are at risk of experiencing disability to different extents, using data from a pilot study of the WHO Model Disability Survey in Cambodia and random forest regression. Hindering or facilitating aspects of places to socialize in community activities, transportation and natural environment as well as use and need of personal assistance and use of medication on a regular basis were the most important environmental factors across groups. Hindering or facilitating aspects of the general environment were the most relevant in persons experiencing mild levels of difficulties in capacity, while social support, attitudes of others and use of medication on a regular basis were highly relevant for the performance of persons experiencing moderate to higher levels of difficulties in capacity. Additionally, we corroborate the high importance of the use and need of assistive devices for people with severe difficulties in capacity.

Determinants of Work Performance in Workers with Depression and Anxiety: A Cross-Sectional Study

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Identifying key environmental barriers experienced by persons with mild, moderate, or severe disability in Bankim Health District, Cameroon: a policy-targeted secondary analysis of data obtained with the World Bank and WHO model disability survey

“…In a pilot study in Cambodia, places to socialize for community activities, transportation, and the natural environment as well as use and need of personal assistance and use of medication on a regular basis were the most important cross-cutting environmental factors [16]. A large representative study in Chile aiming to identify which environmental factors were the most responsible for disability experienced by persons with mental disorders identified the availability and frequency of personal assistance and assistive devices for mobility as the most important environmental factors across conditions, but discrimination and use of health services also played an important role [17].…”

An innovative approach to the assessment of hydro-political risk: A spatially explicit, data driven indicator of hydro-political issues

“…Moreover, RF is not sensitive to monotonic transformations of the independent variables; at the same there is no need to perform a feature selection: RF automatically ignores the variables that do not ensure a good split. This model was successfully applied in many fields of study in which the traditional statistical analysis is afflicted by the problem of multicollinearity and the independent variables are characterized by high covariance, as for instance: genomics (Chen and Ishwaran, 2012), remote sensing (Jing et al, 2016; Rasquinha and Sankaran, 2016; Vogels et al, 2017), public health (Loidl et al, 2016), hydrology (Li et al, 2016; Mohr et al, 2017; Núñez et al, 2016), agriculture (Jeong et al, 2016), and ecological indicators (Pourtaghi et al, 2016). To our best knowledge, the assessment presented in this paper is the first application of a RF approach to a dyadic dataset in the context of international water interactions.…”