Box 2. Washington Group Questions

The Washington Group on Disability Statistics has developed tools to measure disability in line with the functional approach of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health of the World Health Organization (WHO). They avoid the term ‘disability’ and instead only address limitations in undertaking basic activities. Originally designed for large-scale national questionnaires, development and humanitarian organizations increasingly use them for their own purposes. Most often, they apply the Washington Group Short Set (WG-SS) of questions, which covers six core domains: walking, seeing, hearing, cognition, self-care and communication. Each question has four response categories: 1) No, no difficulty; 2) Yes, some difficulty; 3) Yes, a lot of difficulty; 4) Cannot do it at all (Cheshire and Humanity & Inclusion [HI], 2018, p. 7). The Washington Group also has additional tools for situations that require more detail or concern children.


Note:
The Washington Group on Disability Statistics was founded in 2001 to develop standard indicators of disability in surveys and censuses by national statistics offices. It was established under the United Nations Statistics Commission. For more information on the Washington Group, see their website.