Exploring the Association Between 'Soft' Health Indicators, Capacity, Environmental Factors and Functioning (303620)

Keywords: Health, disability, measurement error, data quality

The Model Disability Survey (MDS) is intended to be implemented globally as a general population survey. The purpose of the survey is to provide detailed and nuanced information on the lives of people with disability. However, it allows direct comparison between groups with differing levels of disability, including comparison to people without disability, as the survey tool do not suggest any screening of persons with disabilities. The MDS explores disability as an outcome of interactions between a persons health condition and various environmental and personal factors (WHO 2016). This view is reflected in the survey structure, which enables differentiation between bodily capacity, environmental factors and functioning, where the latter is considered to be the outcome of capacity and environmental factors. The survey also includes ”soft” health indicators such as self-rated all-in-all health and questions on quality of life.

This study contributes to this increasingly important area, by investigating the association between different health measures within one particular health survey. Different ways of measuring health are incorporated into one survey tool, which means that all the test subjects has been exposed to several ways to measure health and thus allows for comparison of the measurements, without any concerns for biased sampling.

The study is taking advantage of an extensive data set consisting of five subsets including three rounds of cognitive interviews and two pilots. Over a period of three years, data have been collected from 1083 test subjects in Malawi, Cambodia, and Norway. Each country represents a specific socio cultural context, which adds to the comparative interest considering the aim of MDS---which is to develop a standardized tool for measuring disability that works equally well for healthy as well as less healthy people, and wealthy as well as less wealthy people.