Why the wording of your questions is important

We talked about different ways of defining disability in chapter 6. We explained that in your HR system, you should use the question based on the Equality Act 2010. But you can also add a question based on the social model.

In your staff survey, you should focus on the social model of disability.

You might decide to ask both questions in your staff survey. This could help you monitor:

• how many people meet the legal definition but aren’t sharing through HR
• how many people would benefit from adjustments even if they don’t meet the legal definition

As we explained, you should not ask questions about specific conditions on their own. Use the information in these sections to decide if you need to collect this data.

The importance of wording

The way you phrase questions makes a difference about how people will answer. The government’s voluntary reporting framework asks what questions you used.

Voluntary reporting on disability, mental health and wellbeing (GOV.UK)

There is stigma attached to the word ‘disabled’. This means many people don’t feel comfortable identifying as disabled. There are also many definitions people use. This can make it difficult to know how to ‘count’ how many disabled people there are.

Scope’s let’s talk report surveyed people with conditions and impairments. They found people sometimes answer ‘no’ to monitoring questions because:

• the phrasing didn’t feel relevant to them
• they didn’t feel they needed adjustments so they had no motivation to share information
• the questions were intrusive, for example asking for medication and treatment details

Let’s talk about disability at work report (Scope)

There are people that society tends to automatically consider ‘disabled’. But it doesn’t mean that people with this condition will associate with the word.

The government’s voluntary reporting framework suggests the following wording:

“Do you consider yourself to have a disability or long term health condition (mental health and/or physical health)?”

The guidance was published in November 2018. Since then, the Office for National Statistics published information about how they developed the questions for the 2021 census. This is the most detailed research on diversity monitoring in the UK available. We used the questions in the census as a basis to develop best practice recommendations.

Question development for the 2021 census (ONS)