Normative Data for the 12-item WHODAS 2.0 among Community-Dwelling Adults with Disabilities

Research Objectives: (1) To provide age and gender-specific norms for the WHODAS 2.0 12-item version among Korean community-dwelling adults with disabilities. (2) To provide the age-specific norms at the 25th through 95th percentiles for the population.

Design: cross-sectional observational study

Setting: general community. subjects were recruited at the 65 public healthcare centers in Korea for this cross-sectional study.

Participants: Community-dwelling adults (40-year-old or older) with disabilities following acquired brain injury, spinal cord injury, etc.

Interventions: face-to-face surveys conducted by interviewers

Main Outcome Measures: The range of scores from WHODAS 2.0 12-item version is from 0 to 100 (A higher score means more difficulty). The norms were stratified for both age (5 groups; 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, and 80-89) and gender and were stratified for age at the 25th through 95th percentiles. Descriptive statistics, independent t-test, and ANOVA were performed using SPSS version 28.0.

Results: A total of 935 adults aged 40-89 with disabilities participated in this study. Demographic characteristics are the following: age (M=64.13, SD=10.69); gender (females were 46.83% of the total); duration of the disease (M=13.52, SD=13.24, range 1-64); and marital status (married were 63.64%, divorce or widowed 28.45%). The norm of each group was 40s=47.25 (SD=26.37), 50s=46.79 (SD=21.27), 60s=46.50 (SD=24.18), 70s=45.83 (SD=22.47), and 80s=45.83 (SD=22.47), respectively. Norms are provided with each of the two tables. WHODAS scores in the total sample were a mean of 46.81, SD=23.24. We found no difference in the WHODAS score both between groups stratified by age (p=0.355) and between genders (p=0.627).

Conclusions: This paper provides normative data for the 12-item version of WHODAS 2.0 among people with disabilities in Korea. How much difficulty people with disabilities feel in activity and participation was not influenced by age and gender. Despite the limitation that this data only includes people with disabilities, it provides cross-national variation in norms for disability measures.

Author(s) Disclosures: Nothing to disclose.