Each month, my friend Nanette Goodman will highlight important statistics about disability in our series called #FactsThenAct where we highlight the strengths and limitations of data as well as knowing how act! Today we talk about how disability data is collected in the U.S.

We have many large national surveys that focus on different aspects of our lives. For example, The Current Population Survey asks about employment; The American Housing Survey identifies housing issues; The American Community Survey measures poverty and many more topics.

An increasing number of these and smaller surveys use six questions to identify respondents with disabilities. These yes/no questions ask about functional difficulties such as difficulty hearing, if you are blind or low vision even when wearing glasses,

(cont.) ,have a physical mental or emotional condition that causes you to have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering or making decisions, difficulty walking or climbing stairs, difficulty dressing or bathing, or having difficulty running errands.

Generally, people are considered to have a disability if they answer yes to at least one of the questions. Capturing whether a survey respondent has a disability in a few questions can be very difficult.

We all have different ideas on what the term “disability” means and for many people the term disability is associated with stigma so they do not want to disclose, even on an anonymous survey.

Focusing on specific functional domains, avoids some of these challenges. Researchers know these questions aren’t perfect and may not capture all people with disabilities but they give us a good way to measure the status of a group of people who are at risk of being excluded.