Compare methods

	Washington Group Short Set	Disability Quality of Life Assessment
Field	Disability Studies	Disability Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Latent structure
Year of origin	2011	2002
Originator	Washington Group on Disability Statistics (Jennifer Madans, Mitchell Loeb, Barbara Altman)	Robert L. Schalock & Miguel Angel Verdugo; World Health Organization (ICF)
Type	Standardized survey-question set for census-based disability measurement	Measurement methodology for quality of life in disability populations
Seminal source	Madans, J. H., Loeb, M. E., & Altman, B. M. (2011). Measuring disability and monitoring the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: the work of the Washington Group on Disability Statistics. BMC Public Health, 11(Suppl 4), S4.	Schalock, R. L., & Verdugo, M. A. (2002). Handbook on Quality of Life for Human Service Practitioners. Washington, DC: American Association on Mental Retardation. ISBN: 9780940898776
Aliases	WG Short Set, WG-SS Disability Questions, Washington Group Census Questions, Six-Domain Functional Difficulty Set	QOL Measurement in Disability, Health-Related Quality of Life Assessment, Disability HRQOL Methodology, QOL-in-Disability Assessment
Related	3	3
Summary	The Washington Group Short Set on Functioning is a brief, standardized set of six survey questions designed to identify people at risk of participation restrictions because of difficulty in basic functional domains. Developed by the Washington Group on Disability Statistics under United Nations auspices, the short set asks about difficulty in seeing, hearing, walking or climbing steps, remembering or concentrating, self-care, and communicating, each answered on a common four-level scale running from no difficulty to cannot do at all. Its purpose, as set out by Madans and colleagues in 2011, is to produce internationally comparable disability statistics that can be collected even in a population census and that support monitoring of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The questions are grounded in the functioning perspective of the WHO ICF, deliberately measuring difficulty in carrying out basic actions rather than diagnoses or impairments. A simple cut-off on the difficulty scale converts the answers into a disability classification used to estimate prevalence and to disaggregate other indicators.	Quality of life assessment in disability populations is the general methodology for measuring how well people with disabilities are living, encompassing both overall quality of life and health-related quality of life. Unlike a single instrument or model, it is a set of methodological commitments and decisions that researchers and practitioners must navigate whenever they attempt such measurement. Drawing on the quality-of-life science consolidated by Schalock and Verdugo and on the biopsychosocial framing of disability in the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, the methodology distinguishes objective life conditions from subjective evaluation, weighs generic against condition-specific instruments, and confronts phenomena that are especially acute in disability populations. Chief among these are response shift, the tendency for a person's internal standards to change over time, and the disability paradox, in which people with serious impairments often report a good quality of life that observers would not predict. The methodology also insists on accessible administration and valid proxy reporting so that people who communicate differently are measured fairly rather than excluded.