Measuring Disability and Inclusion in relation to the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development

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Measuring disability and monitoring the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: the work of the Washington Group on Disability Statistics

The Washington Group on Disability Statistics is a voluntary working group made up of representatives of over 100 National Statistical Offices and international, non-governmental and disability organizations that was organized under the aegis of the United Nations Statistical Division. The purpose of the Washington Group is to deal with the challenge of disability definition and measurement in a way that is culturally neutral and reasonably standardized among the UN member states. The work, which began in 2001, took on added importance with the passage and ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities since the Convention includes a provision for monitoring whether those with and without disabilities have equal opportunities to participate in society and this will require the identification of persons with disabilities in each nation. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) developed by the World Health Organization provided a framework for conceptualizing disability. Operationalizing an ICF-based approach to disability has required the development of new measurement tools for use in both censuses and surveys. To date, a short set of six disability-related questions suitable for use in national censuses has been developed and adopted by the Washington Group and incorporated by the United Nations in their Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses. A series of extended sets of questions is currently under development and some of the sets have been tested in several countries. The assistance of many National and International organizations has allowed for cognitive and field testing of the disability questionnaires in multiple languages and locations. This paper will describe the work of the Washington Group and explicate the applicability of its approach and the questions developed for monitoring the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Harmonising summary measures of population health using global survey instruments.

measures of population health-health expectancies in particular-have become a standard for quantifying and monitoring population health. To date, cross-national comparability of health expectancies is limited, except within the European Union (EU). To advance international comparability, the European Joint Action on Healthy Life Years (JA: EHLEIS) set up an international working group. The working group discussed the conceptual basis of summary measures of population health and made suggestions for the development of comparable health expectancies to be used across the EU and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members. In this paper, which summarises the main results, we argue that harmonised health data needed for health expectancy calculation can best be obtained from 'global' survey measures, which provide a snapshot of the health situation using 1 or a few survey questions. We claim that 2 global measures of health should be pursued for their high policy relevance: a global measure of participation restriction and a global measure of functional limitation. We finally provide a blueprint for the future development and implementation of the 2 global measures. The blueprint sets the basis for subsequent international collaboration, having as a core group Member States of the EU, the USA and Japan. Other countries, in particular OECD members, are invited to join the initiative

Are Racial and Ethnic Minorities Less Willing to Participate in Health Research?

BACKGROUND: It is widely claimed that racial and ethnic minorities, especially in the US, are less willing than non-minority individuals to participate in health research. Yet, there is a paucity of empirical data to substantiate this claim. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We performed a comprehensive literature search to identify all published health research studies that report consent rates by race or ethnicity. We found 20 health research studies that reported consent rates by race or ethnicity. These 20 studies reported the enrollment decisions of over 70,000 individuals for a broad range of research, from interviews to drug treatment to surgical trials. Eighteen of the twenty studies were single-site studies conducted exclusively in the US or multi-site studies where the majority of sites (i.e., at least 2/3) were in the US. Of the remaining two studies, the Concorde study was conducted at 74 sites in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and France, while the Delta study was conducted at 152 sites in Europe and 23 sites in Australia and New Zealand. For the three interview or non-intervention studies, African-Americans had a nonsignificantly lower overall consent rate than non-Hispanic whites (82.2% versus 83.5%; odds ratio [OR] = 0.92; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.84–1.02). For these same three studies, Hispanics had a nonsignificantly higher overall consent rate than non-Hispanic whites (86.1% versus 83.5%; OR = 1.37; 95% CI 0.94–1.98). For the ten clinical intervention studies, African-Americans' overall consent rate was nonsignificantly higher than that of non-Hispanic whites (45.3% versus 41.8%; OR = 1.06; 95% CI 0.78–1.45). For these same ten studies, Hispanics had a statistically significant higher overall consent rate than non-Hispanic whites (55.9% versus 41.8%; OR = 1.33; 95% CI 1.08–1.65). For the seven surgery trials, which report all minority groups together, minorities as a group had a nonsignificantly higher overall consent rate than non-Hispanic whites (65.8% versus 47.8%; OR = 1.26; 95% CI 0.89–1.77). Given the preponderance of US sites, the vast majority of these individuals from minority groups were African-Americans or Hispanics from the US. CONCLUSIONS: We found very small differences in the willingness of minorities, most of whom were African-Americans and Hispanics in the US, to participate in health research compared to non-Hispanic whites. These findings, based on the research enrollment decisions of over 70,000 individuals, the vast majority from the US, suggest that racial and ethnic minorities in the US are as willing as non-Hispanic whites to participate in health research. Hence, efforts to increase minority participation in health research should focus on ensuring access to health research for all groups, rather than changing minority attitudes

Disclosure avoidance issues at NCHS

Funding for the conference and its preparation were provided by National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant SES-0922494, the U.S. Census Bureau's Center for Economic Studies, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Edmund Ezra Day Professorship at Cornell University.A workshop that brought together university-based researchers, members of the international official statistical community, and other interested user communities was held on July 31, 2009, the Friday before the 2009 Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington DC at the U.S. Census Bureau's Headquarters building in Suitland, MD. The purpose of the workshop was to discuss and critique newly created public-use micro-data files that are based on the concepts of “synthetic data” and “partially synthetic data.”The workshop was held at the Census Bureau’s Headquarters in Suitland, MD

101 - Introduction to Data Sets: National Center for Health Statistics

Jennifer H. Madans, PhD, Associate Director for Science and Co-Acting Deputy Director, CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)What are the leading causes of death in the U.S.? How many Americans smoke? How many Americans are obese? Are emergency departments more crowded than they used to be? The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) collects, analyzes, and disseminates data needed to answer these and many other key questions about health and health care in the United States. As a part of the federal statistical system, the mission of NCHS is to provide statistical information that will guide actions and policies to improve the health of the American people. Collaborating with other public and private health partners, NCHS employs a variety of data collection mechanisms to obtain accurate information from multiple sources. Sources of data collection include: Birth and death certificates, Patient medical records, Personal interviews (in households and by phone), Standardized physical examinations and lab tests. Facility information Using these sources, NCHS produces data on a wide range of health topics such as: Health conditions, Health-related behaviors, Health insurance coverage, Access to and use of health care services, Practice of medicine in the United States, Injuries, Disabilities, Births, including teenage births. Leading causes of death Participants will be introduced to the NCHS portfolio of surveys and data collection systems, types of data that are available, and the mechanisms by which these data are made available for public use

Occupational Segregation By Sex: An Analysis Of The Determinants Of Occupational Sex Composition Among Female Workers.

PhDSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/181091/2/7813694.pd

Comments on Sabariego et al. Measuring Disability: Comparing the Impact of Two Data Collection Approaches on Disability Rates. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health, 2015, 12, 10329–10351

In the article, Measuring Disability: Comparing the Impact of Two Data Collection Approaches on Disability Rates, in Volume 12 of the Journal International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Carla Sabariego et al. [1] raise several issues regarding the use of the short set of questions developed by the Washington Group on Disability Statistics (WG) as compared with the approach to disability measurement proposed through the Model Disability Survey (MDS). We address these below. [...