Washington Group Short Set

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.