Grrr, seriously?

[davidgillon]

I completed the government Disability Unit's disability survey last night. This is supposed to be used to inform the government's new disability strategy, which they've been promising for several years. If the survey is any indication, then the strategy will be able to be summed up in five words: "I really can't be arsed". (This is pretty much the current strategy). It was so badly written and designed I ended up live-tweeting my progress, which adds up to a couple of pages worth of post.

The survey is here if you're interested, and is open to non-disabled people as well as disabled: https://t.co/KhfMnXVwul 

(Accessibility to any Tom, Dick, or non-disabled Harriet may be a problem, depending on how they analyse the results).

I had a bad feeling as soon as I hit questions 2 and 3. Is it just me, or is thus simultaneously both the clumsiest formulation possible and borderline offensive in equating sex and gender? (And having googled it, it's not entirely consistent with the official government position on sex and gender as that does distinguish between them).

 

"

2. What is your sex?

Female

Male

Prefer not to say

3. Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?

Yes

No

If you have selected no, please specify:

"

 

It then goes into a set of questions trying to determine if you're disabled/carer/parent/interested non-disabled. This is so well organised I had a former director at the Equality and Human Rights Commission asking me if I could figure out what it was after.

And in general trying to figure out what quite a few questions were after was so difficult I was seriously tempted to go find the Easy Read versions, which do at least exist, so see if they would shed any light on the meaning.

And this could make a real difference in some of the questions, such as the one asking how many times you've met other people in the last week (which should clearly have been 'typical week' even before lockdown). Whether that's face to face or virtually makes a major difference when you're trying to understand the physical isolation of disabled people.

And if you followed the precise English meaning of the options, there was no option for meeting people once or twice, as the options were 'Less than 1 or 2', '3 to 5', '4 to 7' and so on. If the author had this much trouble with written English then I dread to think what the Easy Read is like if they did that too.

Quite a few of the questions were covertly politically loaded, such as ""To what extent do you agree with the statement “I have enough close friends/family that I can depend on to get the support I need”? The answer clearly varies with whether you agree with depending on friends/family, or think the state should provide that support.

While other questions framed discrimination issues as our problem, for instance:

"50 Have concerns about other people's views of you ever stopped you from seeking {several things}"

Notice how it's worded as your perception being the issue, not the views of others.

Significant parts of the survey are presented depending on your answers to previous questions, more on why this is a problem in a moment, but first

"35. You said you would like more contact. Have any of the below made it more difficult to make more contact? (Select up to 3) "

Which then gives 14 options including 'Other', none of them are "inaccessibility of the built environment" or similar. The closest they get to it are toilets or transport. Obviously I put it in as my 'Other' answer, but this is a major omission, the biggest problem I face getting around Rochester are the footpaths* (they overwhelmingly have a camber greater than national guidelines, so steering in a straight line means pushing the downhill wheel, while braking the uphill one, this is less than efficient), and footpaths and cobbles are neither transport nor toilets. 

* Well, the footpaths and not being able to get through the front doors of 50% of the shops.

And here's that 'intelligent' selecting of the questions based on your answers:

"38. Does anyone help or support you with your care needs? "

"44. What do you consider to be the main reason it was difficult to pay your usual living expenses?"

No, I haven't missed something, q44 directly follows q38 if you answer "none", yet clearly depends on a skipped question

If I change my answer to q38, it opens up q39-42, which relate to it, and also :

"43. How do you find paying for your usual living expenses (this includes extra medical necessities)? "

which is clearly a prerequisite for understanding q44

And then it gets worse:

"47. Are you currently employed?"

Answer you're not currently seeking employment, and it skips the entire employment section. So if you've been driven out of the workforce by disability discrimination, then @DisabilityGovUK doesn't want to know.

If you say you're not currently working, there's no way to access q49, which is about workplace disability discrimination, which is precisely why many disabled people aren't working. If you say you are, there's no way to answer q48 on disability discrimination in recruitment, the other reason. The only way to answer all the employment questions is to keep going back to q47, which it does at least allow, and change your answer until you've worked through all of the options, and then finally change it back to the actual answer you want. (And of course it may then strip out all the answers that don't fit your final choice, but what more can you do?

"Overall, to what extent do you feel that the things you do in your life are complete? "

What does that even mean?

And it's meant to inform a long term strategy, yet the free text question on Covid issues offers 250 words, while the long term strategy questions offer 100 words.

 

It's an utter mess. I can't tell if it's simply incompetent, or incompetent and with a political axe to grind/predefined set of answers to deliver. It doesn't feel like it was written by someone with an understanding of disability, or surveys. And I'm none too sure about their understanding of the English language either.

 

Comments

[hilarita]

Or g) All of the Above?

[davidgillon]

That!

[sovay]

Is it just me, or is thus simultaneously both the clumsiest formulation possible and borderline offensive in equating sex and gender?

It is not just you. "Prefer not to say" is not the right third option for either sex or gender.

The general incomprehensibility is also not just you.

[davidgillon]

Thanks, I was pretty sure I was right, but I hesitate to be definitive on things like that, especially when the general wording is so clumsy.

[jesse_the_k]

Wow, that's so bad I bet someone's niece (or nephew or blackmailer) got the job.

[davidgillon]

Oh god, it's worse than I thought.

I just looked the Disability Unit up as I wasn't certain who it answered too:
"We were formed in November 2019, bringing together the Office for Disability Issues and other experts from across government.

We are part of the new Equalities Hub in the Cabinet Office along with the Race Disparity Unit and the Government Equalities Office."

That means they ultimately work for Michael Gove, who runs the Cabinet Office* and was Boris's political partner in bringing Brexit to pass. And while he seems to think of himself as Machiavelli reborn, everything he touches seems to crumble to dust. Meanwhile the Minister for Women and Equalities, Liz Truss, who runs the equality side of things in her spare time*, gave a speech in December where she claimed that "the UK focused too heavily on “fashionable” race, sexuality, and gender issues at the expense of poverty and geographical disparity. It also attacked postmodernist philosophy and Foucault. In the speech, she announced that the government and civil service would no longer be using unconscious bias training."

* Which is actually a ministry in its own right, being responsible for all kinds of stuff, such as running elections. It used to be the Cabinet Office Minister was also Deputy PM, but Boris wouldn't trust Gove with that.

** I wish I was joking, she's also Secretary of State for International Trade, a cabinet level post, so Equalities is definitely a hobby post.

[vass]

*hisses*

This sounds horrible, and way too familiar.

[green_knight]

Sounds as if the survey was created by the same person or persons who created the trespassing consultation.

I'm a geographer. This means I was taught how to create surveys, and I am editing many, MANY books that teach people how to create surveys.

The government manages to hit almost every square on the bingo card for 'bad design examples' and you don't do that by accident.

[davidgillon]

Yeah, I got some of that teaching in the OR part of my degree, and I've deliberately dissected DWP surveys in the past, there's no doubt it's deliberate. The design doc for the survey on whether work is good for you stated in advance what the result would be!!

IIRC by the time it came out the official responsible had moved on, and was now working on wind power - which tells you the level of domain expertise the Civil Service considers necessary.

[cosmolinguist]

I can't tell if it's simply incompetent, or incompetent and with a political axe to grind/predefined set of answers to deliver.

Oh the latter. The pre-defined answers they're steering you towards has been part of every government consultation, local or national, I've responded to.