To count the number of Americans who are disabled, the U.S. Census Bureau, through its ACS questionnaire, asks yes-or-no questions about whether one or more people in a household have “serious difficulty” doing a number of things including hearing, seeing, walking or climbing stairs, bathing or doing errands alone. An October 2022 study from Health Affairs found that a quarter of respondents with psychiatric disabilities and one-fifth of people with developmental disabilities didn’t respond “yes” to any of those questions, proof that the current questionnaire doesn’t accurately capture some disabilities.
People with disabilities have good reason to fear that such a change could lead to many of them being overlooked.
That’s why it’s distressing that the National Center for Health Statistics has proposed that the Census Bureau replace the yes-and-no questions with questions from the Washington Group Short Set on Functioning (WG-SS), which prompts respondents to answer whether they have no difficulty, some difficulty, a lot of difficulty with some tasks or if they can’t do them at all.
People with disabilities have good reason to fear that such a change could lead to many of them being overlooked. Indeed, when the Census Bureau tested the questions in 2022, “the estimated percent of the U.S. population with any disability was about 40 percent lower” in the test than in a control group.
The Health Affairs study found that the WG-SS survey failed to identify 43% of respondents with disabilities. Meanwhile, an analysis by the National Partnership of Women and Families conducted an analysis and found that the proposed survey standard would cut the counted number of women and girls with disabilities by 9.6 million.
Given that the United States has just gone through a pandemic that, in addition to claiming the lives of 1.14 million people, resulted in 6.9% of Americans experiencing long Covid, the Census Bureau has not only a duty but an incredible…
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