The housing and accessibility module includes topics on specific housing adaptations that have been completed in the participants’ home. If adaptations are required, participants will be asked about the barriers to access. Participants will also be asked about the general suitability of their home, in terms of accessibility.
This module will also capture information on accessibility outside of the home. Participants will be asked about accessibility issues outside the home, and location of these issues, and more generally about accessibility issues within their community.
Additional housing-related information will be added from other available sources, such as the Census of Population. Administrative data relevant to this module may include housing tenure, social housing status, dwelling type, the number of rooms, and whether the participant lives alone.
Distance to amenities was discussed in several consultations. For example, proximity to supermarkets, medical centres, libraries, green spaces, public transport, hospitality and retail venues were suggested as amenities of interest. This data will fall under a wider “access to key services” project, which is being conducted by other surveys in the CSO.
Participants residing in communal establishments will be included in the pilot sample with participants from private households, and disaggregated by other factors such as sex, age and disability type. There was interest in data dissemination by residence type, but due to the anticipated number of respondents living in communal establishments being small relative to those living in private households, this will not be possible.
This survey won’t include questions on specific accessibility needs on a room-by-room basis, nor will it ask when adaptations were completed. Accessibility issues within specific locations, such as school, will also not be asked within this module, but may appear elsewhere in the survey.
There was some interest in collecting information on difficulties beyond the physical environment, such as difficulties with noise or weather and questions relating to future adaption needs, home heating ability or barrier to adequately heating homes, and the desire to live independently. These topics were deprioritised as they ranked lower than topics retained for inclusion and to ensure the housing module isn’t overly burdensome.