Using a Composite Index to Measure Social Inclusion of People with Disabilities

Abstract

Measuring disability is a very challenging task, because of its complexity and multidimensionality. Indeed, data from different statistical sources may vary both for the aspects of disability surveyed and for the way they identify a person as belonging to the population with disability. We present an empirical study with a comparison among EU countries between conditions of disabled and non-disabled people, using individual indicators on people’s major life domains (education, training, labor market participation, living conditions, social participation, health conditions) obtained from different surveys. We handle the inherently multidimensional nature of disability through a synthetic measure of disparity between disabled and non-disabled people obtained using the methodology on composite indices, which allows to find suitable combination of the individual indicators, aiming at measuring active inclusion of persons with disabilities in EU countries. We consider a non-compensatory composite index, that is based on the assumption of non-substitutability of the individual indicators.