Different government departmens of disability, this resunts use different definitiolts in differing statistics on the number of disabled people and misses out certain groups of people who may have rights under the Disability Discrimination Act. The medical model is often used to define disability as opposed to the social model which looks at the social barriers that affect life opportunities.
The Office for Disability Issues (ODI) & the Office for National Statistics (ONS)have developed a new draft set of questions to address this problem. This should result in data to be more easily compared across different government departments.
ODI commissioned Independent Social Research (ISR) to cognitively test the questions. This assessed how people with a range of impairments understood and responded to the questions and gave recommendations for revision.
