Ecological Validation of WHODAS 2.0 for Disability Assessment in Pakistan

Abstract

Disability is a complicated term to define, especially in a country like Pakistan, where the definition of disability is still debatable. The existing service delivery models, including disability assessment, are based on the medical model. The objective of the study was to use the standardized instrument WHO Disability Assessment Schedule (WHODAS-2.0) and establish its ecological validity for disability assessment in Pakistan. Data was collected from 371 out-of-school children with disabilities from three districts of Punjab by using the purposive sampling technique. An innovative method was used to establish ecological validity by taking 45 randomly selected cases among samples, and these cases were presented to a panel of nine experts/raters. The findings of the study concluded a correlation between raters' total score and total sample score, which was found positively strong and significant as r = .819, p = < .001, and it indicated that the use of the WHODAS 2.0 version is ecologically fit forthe use of disability assessment.