Appendices

(viii)Table supporting Figure 6.3: the gap in the multidimensional poverty headcount between adults with no difficulty and adults with some difficulty, and between adults with no difficulty and adults with at least a lot of difficulty in Guatemala at the village level

Appendix 2a: Methodology of the review of datasets

Survey and census questionnaires were retrieved and reviewed by a team of researchers. Questionnaires from 2009 to 2022 were retrieved from the online International Household Survey Network Microdata catalog, the World Bank Microdata Library catalog, the International Labor Organization survey catalog, the repository of census questionnaires maintained by the United Nations Statistics Division, and the websites of individual National Statistical Offices and other national or regional entities collecting national representative surveys.

To identify if a survey asked any question at all on disability, each questionnaire was searched looking for several disability-related words: disability, difficulty in seeing, hearing, walking, concentrating, self-care, communicating, impairment (blind, deaf, dumb, mental, physical), limited in usual activit(y/ies), limited in the amount of work or type of work or activities related to work, Activities of Daily Living (ADL)s (e.g. dressing, bathing) and questions related to limitations in Instrumental ADLs (IADLs) (e.g. housework, cooking). Each researcher filled a log regarding what questions were found on the different types of surveys or censuses above for each dataset-year. Each log was reviewed by a second researcher.

This review of datasets has noteworthy limitations. The list of search terms related to disability is not exhaustive, nor is the list of datasets that was reviewed. For some datasets, we could not find questionnaires, or they were not in a language that the contributors could read (English, French, Hindi, Portuguese, Spanish). National data sets were prioritized, thus missing some subnational data collection efforts. Surveys focusing on children were not covered. For trends, we present results for three periods: 2010-2014, 2015-2019, 2020-2022. Fewer datasets were reviewed in the most recent period (2020-2022): this is a shorter period and because data may still be in the collection phase, questionnaires may not be available yet, also during the Covid-19 pandemic, especially in 2020, most countries around the globe stopped their data collection process or changed modality of data collection, aspect that reduces the number of available surveys between 2020-2022. This limitation may contribute to noise in the analysis of the most recent trends, especially if the datasets that are not yet available tend to use more or different disability questions compared to those that were reviewed.

Importantly, although we highlight in Dataset Results Tables D2 and D3 datasets that are considered to have internationally comparable questions on disability, the WG-SS and Other functional difficulty questions respectively, we have no information on how the data was collected in the field. We have no information on interviewers’ training, how they asked disability-related questions and if they provided disability accommodation to include persons with disabilities as respondents. Given potential stigma associated with disability, the narrative that interviewers use to introduce or explain questions on functional difficulties is important and might vary across countries even when using identical questions. Further research could examine survey’s guidelines to interviewers on the WG-SS and the effect of changes on those guidelines in data collection and cross-country comparisons.