Exploring the Relationship between Impairment and Disability in Great Britain: Evidence from the Life Opportunities Survey

Academic and government policy evidence which quantifies the disadvantage experienced by disabled people in the UK relies on ‘global’ self reported measures of disability available in large-scale national surveys. Understanding who is captured by such measures and the ‘process of disablement’ is therefore vital. This paper applies multivariate regression analysis to nationally representative and uniquely rich data for Great Britain from the Life Opportunities Survey (2009-2011) to investigate the relationship between a well-established measure of activity-limiting disability, and the type and severity of impairment. Conditional on personal characteristics, the risk of disability is found to increase with the presence and severity of impairment. It also varies dramatically by impairment type, being highest for those with impairments relating to mobility and mental ill-health, and lowest for impairments relating to vision and hearing.