How are people with disability identified by the WG-SS questions?

The WG-SS question response categories capture a range of severity in the difficulty experienced. Multiple disability scenarios can be described depending on the domain(s) of interest and the choice of severity cut-off. There is more than one way to capture disability through the application of this set of core questions; resulting in not one but several possible population prevalence estimates that will vary in both size and in composition of the group identified as having a disability.

The WG recommends that the following cut-off be used to define the populations with and without disabilities for the purpose of computing prevalence and differentials in participation for international reporting and cross-national comparability:

The population disabled includes everyone with at least one domain that is coded as a lot of difficulty or cannot do it at all.

Countries using the WG short set of questions should not feel restricted to only producing data based on the above cut-off. Data can be presented by individual domains of functioning, and at several levels of severity from very mild (some difficulty) to very severe (unable to do at all). For example, discovering that in rural regions of the country participation restrictions tend to kick in at lower levels of activity limitations than in urban areas could be suggestive that barriers to participation are more significant in areas with poorer infrastructure.