Data and Research
This page features disability news on Data and Research from the Debrief Library. See also news on other subjects.
Overview
International
The importance of citizen-generated disability data. (Mar, CBM Global)
Global prevalence of developmental disabilities in children and adolescents: a systematic umbrella review. (Feb, Frontiers in Public Health)
Counting children with disabilities starts with changing minds. (Dec, UNICEF)
Data Dashboard on health and disability, “includes data on overall mortality and COVID-19 mortality for people with disabilities, as well as key health indicators” (Missing Billion)
Module on Child Functioning: Guidance note for translation and customization (Oct, UNICEF)
Harmonizing Disability Data to improve disability research and policy. (Oct, Health Affairs)
Global and regional prevalence of disabilities among children and adolescents: Analysis of findings from global health databases. Comparing data from UNICEF and Global Burden of Disease Study. (Sep, Frontiers Public Health)
Household Survey Data on Disability and Education in countries where the Global Partnership for Education works. “There remain 28 countries (out of 76) for which there appears to be no nationally representative, reliable and comparable survey or census data on disability that could be used for disaggregating education statistics for the period 2010–2020” (Aug, GPE)
An analysis of global prevalence of cerebral palsy. “From the limited but increasing data available from regions in low- and middle-income countries, birth prevalence for pre-/perinatal CP was as high as 3.4 per 1000 live births.” (Aug, Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology)
Why is it Important to Identify the Population with Disabilities? an explainer video. (Jun, Washington Group on Disability Statistics)
The association between household wealth and the prevalence of child disability. Analysis of surveys in 40 low- and middle-income countries give “robust evidence that in LMICs the prevalence of child disability is disproportionately concentrated in poorer households.” (July, Disability and Health Journal)
Exploring the Use of Washington Group Questions to Identify People with Clinical Impairments Who Need Services including Assistive Products: Results from Five Population-Based Surveys (Apr, Environmental Research and Public Health)
Why do we need data on women and girls with disabilities? “One way to address this data gap has been the collection and use of qualitative data, including citizen-generated data from organizations of persons with disabilities and NGO allies to complement official statistics to measure gaps and progress. This use of qualitative data is especially important in emergency situations, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic” (Jul, CBM Global)
Explainer video on how the Washington Group question approach to measuring disability relate to the Social Model? (Jun, Center for Inclusive Policy)
Should you use the Washington Group questions in your humanitarian programming? A tool to help you decide. (Jun, Washington Group on Disability Statistics)
World Bank and Microsoft commit to narrow the data gap. With a “disability data hub” they plan to “expand both access to and the use of demographics and statistics data to ensure representation of disability, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.” (Jun, Microsoft)
Short video to understand the prevalence of disability (May, Center for Inclusive Policy)
Short video on Why is it important to identify the population with disabilities? (Apr, Center for Inclusive Policy)
Summary of an article on conducting online interviews with disabled young people during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Mar, International Journal of Social Research Methodology)
Report on how organizations within the UN are using Disability Statistics (link to pdf, Mar, UN)
How will data help us break the cycle of discrimination and intersectional disadvantages for girls and women with disabilities? (Mar, Inclusive Education Initiative)
A video introducing the Center of Excellence on Data for Children with Disabilities (Mar, UNICEF)
The World Bank Open Learning Campus elearning module on Collecting Data on Disability Inclusion. (World Bank)
Why Disability Data Matters Review of Leonard Cheshire’s latest disability data and the Disability Data Portal. "Where disability data does exist, it
can often remain unused. " (link to pdf, Feb, Leonard Cheshire)
All children count: Fostering inclusion through data. (Feb, Data 4 SDGs)
Addressing the dearth of disability-inclusive data in COVID-19 (Jan, Data Values Digest)
Workshop on Innovative methods for researching disability & COVID19 in the Global South for academics and practitioners, on 3rd March. (Disability Under Siege)
FIRAH applied disability research General call for projects - 2022 Project leaders can be from any country in the world but if they're not French then it has to be in partnership with a French organization. (Jan, FIRAH)
Data-driven advocacy for inclusive employment and social protection The experiences of organizations of persons with disabilities in Bangladesh and Kenya (Dec, Leonard Cheshire)
Disability Data Advocacy Toolkit updated version (link to pdf, Dec, CBM Global)
Asia-Pacific
Are persons with disabilities included in the effort to leave no-one behind? An overview that shows the gaps in countries' ability to monitor the situation of persons with disabilities. See accompanying resource, Where are we?, questions to aid understanding of disability data and inform advocacy, and a blog post on lessons learned. (Feb, UNFPA)
Australia
New Disability Dashboards released “These dashboards offer a new way to access and understand data and insights about the main disability types represented in the NDIS.” (Dec, NDIS)
Bangladesh
Preliminary Report on the National Survey on Persons with Disabilities 2021. A cross-sectional survey of 36,000 households finds that in government definitions of disability 2.8% are disabled and in terms of functional difficulty (a preferred measure), 7.1% have a functional difficulty. (link to pdf, Jun, BBS)
Improving disability data in Bangladesh Access Bangladesh Foundation’s leading advocacy. (Feb, DRF)
China
Report on disability data with a focus on employment. (In Chinese, Feb, JSTV)
Correlation between functional disability and quality of life among rural elderly in Anhui province,: a cross-sectional study. (Feb, BMC Public Health)
Colombia
Colombia’s journey to produce disability statistics (Feb, Data 4 SDGs)
India
Data Gaps: Undercounting Disability In India Explores issues with surveys, disability certification and the unique disability id scheme. (Jul, IndiaSpend)
Factsheet: Disability In Jharkhand results from the National Family Health Survey showing less than 1% of the population having a disability. (Jun, The Sangyan)
Indonesia
How do Positive Deviants Overcome Health-Related Stigma? An Exploration of Development of Positive Deviance Among People With Stigmatized Health Conditions in Indonesia (Dec, Qualitative Health Research)
Jordan
Government update on use of the Washington Group questions in the census and other surveys. (link to pdf, Feb, United Nations Statistical Commission)
Pacific
Introduction to Disability Data Advocacy Workshop for Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (Mar, UNFPA)
Philippines
Functional Difficulty in the Philippines: results from the 2020 census of population and housing. “Nearly nine in every 100 persons (8.7%) had at least one domain of functional difficulty. Females accounted for 55.6 percent.” (Oct, PSA)
Rwanda
Rwanda to conduct first digital census for people with disability. A pilot digital census, using the Washington Group questions, and a precursor to a Disability Management Information System. (Aug, The New Times)
Senegal
Senegal launches action plan to to collect high-quality inclusive data. (Dec, Sightsavers)
South Africa
Monitoring disability inclusion: Setting a baseline for South Africa (May, African Journal of Disability)
Spain
New edition of the Spanish Journal on Disability (REDIS) (in Spanish, Dec, Discapnet)
Tunisia
Quality of life and its predicting factors for Tunisian children with cerebral palsy. (Dec, African Journal on Disability)
Uganda
We are able: interactive radio campaign. Respondents without disabilities more likely to say disabled people experience food insecurity because of low self-esteem and negative attitude than because they face exclusion. (Apr, Trac FM)
United Kingdom
Fall in disabled older people in census data ‘could be due to pandemic’, or the change in wording of the census question. (Feb, The Independent) More young people declared disability in the census after inclusion of mental health in the question about disability.
Childhood disability, social class and social mobility: A neglected relationship. “We specifically focus on the importance of social class for disabled young people's outcomes, emphasizing the need for intersectional analyses of disability inequalities.” (Sep, The British Journal of Sociology)
Outcomes for disabled people in the UK: 2021 detailed statistics from a range of datasets. (Feb, ONS)
United States
Prevalence of disabilities among older Americans is much lower than a decade earlier (Feb, News Medical Life Sciences)
Comparing Measures Of Functional Difficulty With Self-Identified Disability: Implications For Health Policy. Shows how six-question sets “performed especially poorly in capturing respondents with psychiatric disabilities or chronic health conditions.” (Oct, Health Affairs)
A Need For Disability Data Justice “Public health data systems and infrastructure must be built to collect disability data and use this information to combat ableism and support equity and social justice.” (Aug, HealthAffairs)
Disability Data Snapshot: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. (Jul, U.S. Department of Labor Blog)
Research
International
Intellectual disability a perspective on how anthropology can study intellectual disability: “anthropological research reveals dimensions of the social and cultural life of intellectual disability that biomedical and professional research rarely enquires into, let alone comprehends.” (Feb, Open Enyclopedia of Anthropology)
Crip Genealogies “The contributors to Crip Genealogies reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship and activism. They challenge the white, Western, and Northern rights-based genealogy of disability studies, showing how a single coherent narrative of the field is a mode of exclusion that relies on logics of whiteness and imperialism.” (Mar, Duke University Press)
Finding Blindness an edited volume bringing together essays on “international constructions and deconstructions” of blindness. (Dec, Routledge)
Sixteen Years since the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: What Have We Learned since Then? A summary of research articles on disability since the Convention. (Sep, Environmental Research and Public Health)
Disability as Rupture a collection on how disability creates “to reconceptualize ethnographic practices and anthropological projects”:
“Because the infrastructures of everyday life are often predicated on “normal” bodies and their capacities, when disabled bodies interact with those infrastructures, the friction that results exposes the underlying norms that guide social life.” (Sep, Cultural Anthropology)
Adapting Disability Research Methods and Practices During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Experiences from the Field (Jul, IDS)
Divergent Ethnography: Conducting Fieldwork as an Autistic Anthropologist “Doing fieldwork as an autistic person means to see, hear, and process information in different ways, and this difference has an impact on our theoretical approach. In this sense, neurodivergence can be an epistemological position that shapes and informs our way of looking at reality.”
Africa
Developmental disabilities in Africa: A scientometric review “revealed a trend of broadening research towards systems of care, away from a medical model of disease.” (Feb, Research in Developmental Disabilities)
Australia
A step closer to inclusive disability research The National Disability Research Partnership Learnings and Recommendations report. (Nov, NDRP)
Doing research inclusively: co-production in action “provides practical strategies for every step of the co-design process in research.” (May)
Brazil
An edition of Anthropological Horizons focussed on disability. (In Portuguese, Oct, Scielo)
China
Book review of Disability in Contemporary China. Tracing representations of disability from Mao to now. (Apr, Disability Studies Community Blog)
Russia
Intercorporeal Togetherness: On Russian Blind Activists’ Technology of Disability Inclusion. (Aug, Cultural Anthropology)
United States
A symposium on Capitalism & Disability. (Oct, LPE Project)
Open access to research can close gaps for people with disabilities (Sep, Stat News)
Uzbekistan
Layers and Ranges of Disabling Borders A chapter exploring enduring legacies of segregation and ableism in the socio-politics of disability in Uzbekistan. (Invisible Borders in a Bordered World)