Measuring disability in an urban slum community in India using the Washington Group questionnaire

The UN recommends that the 'Washington Group questionnaire (WGQ) on functioning' is used for data collection on disability. There are few studies on the WGQ from India.

To evaluate the prevalence of disability in a community-health project, using this tool: to examine if the use of the WGQ identifies more people with disability than the tools used previously.

We performed a systematic sample survey using the WGQ in the community-health project covering a population of 50,000 residents. The questionnaire was administered to 2203 individuals.

The age and sex distribution of the sample studied matched the National Census data 2011. The study identified 41 individuals with a disability. The prevalence of disability in our sample was 1.86% (95% CI 1.3%-2.43%) compared to 2.21% in India-Census-2011. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve showed that disability was more prevalent after the age of 44 years (p-value <0.0001 and AUC 0.806). The odds ratio of disability was 10.1 above this age compared with those below that age (95% CI: 5.1 to 20).

Use of the WGQ did not yield better data on disability prevalence than that identified by the Census. Another study, this one in Telangana, south India, by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found that self-reporting identifies only a third of the cases of disability. More direct and leading questions are needed to empower the disabled in developing countries to identify barriers which prevent their full participation in society.