Toward Better Disability Items on National Surveys

• Activity Number: 417
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 2, 2016 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Committee on Statistics and Disability
• Author(s): Kimberly Phillips* and Andrew Houtenville and Vidya Sundar
• Companies: UNH Institute on Disability and University of New Hampshire and University of New Hampshire
• Keywords: Disability ; Measurement ; Data

Abstract

The complex and dynamic nature of disability makes it difficult to identify accurately and consistently among survey respondents. In the last eight years, a six question sequence (6QS), first designed the American Community Survey (ACS), has been incorporated into many national surveys. Burkhauser et al. (2014) found that the 6QS, which includes questions related to hearing, vision, ambulatory, cognitive limitations and independent living and self-care difficulties, fails to capture about a quarter to a third of Social Security disability program recipients (presumably false negatives). To further investigate false negatives, we designed the 2015 Kessler Foundation National Employment & Disability Survey (KFNEDS) to incorporate the four ACS functional limitation questions and additional probing questions based on questions from the Canadian Survey of Disability, as well as, an open-ended disability question. We will present the results of this inquiry and a revised set of questions that we will be testing.