Understanding Society User Support

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Best wishes,
Understanding Society User Support Team

So, if I understand correctly, your definition of disability is this: health=2 AND disdif96=0, which translates to: no self-declared long-standing illness or disability AND at least one condition on the disdif list, is that right? If this the case, then the number of such people in wave 8 equals 1,605, so maybe something went wrong in the recoding?

Best wishes,
Understanding Society User Support Team

Hello,

We could not find these variables in the UKHLS Covid Survey Wave 8 dataset (collected in Mar 2021 and more information here https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/covid-19).
I am assuming you are using the main UKHLS survey Wave 8 data (collected in 2016-17 and more information here https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage). Using this data, we created a disabled_status variable as per your description, the sample sizes for each category are shown as N=?:

1. health = 1 (yes to long-standing illness or disability) & disdif96 = 2 [Mentioned disability (formerly 0)] -> "disabled" N=8851
2. health = 2 (No long-standing illness or disability) & disdif96 = 2 -> “disabled” (said no to being disabled but then mentioned a disability) N=1605
3. health = 1 (yes) & disdif96 = 1 (No disability) -> “disabled” (said yes to having a long-term condition but then did not mention a disability) N=4729
6. health = 2 & disdiff96 = 1 -> “Not disabled” [no to health (long-term condition) and disdiff96 “none of these” (conditions)] N=22793

The categories with NA are not useful, as these are the cases where these questions were never asked. Such cases are N=1315

Hope this helps. If you have further questions please let us know.

Best wishes,
Understanding Society User Support Team

Hi,

Maybe we can use the Main survey Wave 10 to make things clearer as we attached these data from Wave 11 to Wave 8 COVID.

So, on the subject of NAs, we took the approach that if they said they were disabled in one question and then didn't answer the second question then we still include them as having answered because a missing answer in one question doesn't change their response to the other question. Please let me know if I am not grasping what you mean. The cases where there's an answer in one and NA in the other are very few to negligible regardless and I don't think this is the cause for large numbers of disabled which can be seen in the breakdown of N for Wave10 disabled_status (Wave10 Disabled_status groups N.PNG).

Looking at Wave 10 then, I have labelled each combination and the column headings show the responses (please see attached "Disabled checks image of code.PNG" for an image of this code and "Wave10 disabled_status full N breakdown.PNG for N counts per combination") - Each row denotes a different combination to the answers to health_dis and disdif96_dis (these are recodes of health and sisdif96 but with response 0 in disdif changed to value 2 as explained above - the N breakdowns are otherwise identical to the original variables). The code looks correct to me if our goal is to capture those who have said they are disabled and those who have said they are not disabled but have answered with a long-term health condition to the disdif question.

It appears to my eye that something is happening in Disabled2 or Disabled3 [Disabled 2 -> health_dis "No" & disdif96_dis "Mentioned Disability" ~ "Disabled2" | Disabled3 -> health_dis "Yes" & disdif96_dis "No Disability" ~ "Disabled3"]. Or, is there possibly some way that people are funnelled from the "Health" question to the "disdif" question that may be causing issues?

This is taken from your variable checker:

disability_w11.disdif
Type of impairment or disability
Type
multichoice
Interviewer Instruction
PROBE FOR ANY OTHERS
CODE ALL THAT APPLY
Text
Even though you don't have any long-standing health problems, do {if HEALTH = 2} / Do you have any health problems or disabilities that mean you have substantial difficulties with any of the following areas of your life? {if HEALTH <> 2}

Your input is appreciated

Will