Compare methods

	Person-Environment Fit (Disability)	Model Disability Survey
Field	Disability Studies	Disability Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2001	2022
Originator	Ecological models of aging and disability (e.g., Lawton & Nahemow competence-press); aligned with the WHO ICF	World Health Organization and World Bank (Model Disability Survey collaboration)
Type	Analytic framework treating disability as misfit between personal capacity and environmental demand	General-population survey operationalizing the ICF biopsychosocial model of functioning
Seminal source	World Health Organization. (2001). International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health: ICF. Geneva: WHO. ISBN: 9789241545426	Sabariego, C., Fellinghauer, C., Lee, L., et al. (2022). Generating comprehensive functioning and disability data worldwide: development process, data analyses strategy and reliability of the WHO and World Bank Model Disability Survey. Archives of Public Health, 80, 6.
Aliases	Competence-Press Model, Demand-Capacity Fit Framework, Ecological Disability Fit Model, Person-Environment Misfit Analysis	MDS, WHO Model Disability Survey, Metric Disability Continuum Survey, ICF-Based Functioning Survey
Related	3	3
Summary	Person-environment fit is an analytic framework that treats disability not as a property of the individual but as a misfit between a person's capacity and the demands their environment places on them. Rooted in ecological models of aging and disability — most famously the competence-press model, in which behavior depends on the balance between personal competence and environmental press — it aligns closely with the biopsychosocial conception of the WHO ICF, where disability emerges from the interaction of the person and contextual factors. The framework asks, for any activity or life situation, whether the environment demands more than the person can supply: when demand exceeds capacity there is misfit and disability is expressed, and when demand is within capacity there is adequate fit and participation proceeds. Crucially, this reframing implies that misfit can be reduced from either side — by raising the person's capacity or, often more powerfully, by lowering environmental demand and adding support. The practical thrust is to target interventions on the environment, not only on remediating the person.	The Model Disability Survey is a general-population survey developed jointly by the World Health Organization and the World Bank to generate comprehensive, internationally comparable data on functioning and disability. Unlike instruments that classify people as disabled or not, it operationalizes the biopsychosocial model of the WHO ICF, treating disability as the outcome of an interaction between a person's intrinsic capacity and the environment in which they live. The survey collects detailed self-reported information on how much difficulty people have across many domains of functioning, distinguishing what a person can do in a standardized environment (capacity) from what they actually do in their own environment (performance), and it separately measures environmental barriers and facilitators. As documented by Sabariego and colleagues in 2022, these responses are combined using a Rasch measurement model into a single metric scale, so that disability is represented as a continuum running across the whole population rather than as a yes/no category. The result is a graded picture of functioning suited to prevalence estimation, equity analysis, and policy on a comparable metric.