Survey Variable: Health Conditions

One of the most personal questions that the Privilege and Participation survey asked was about people’s health conditions. Respondents were shown a list of nineteen different physical and mental health conditions and asked to select those that they have. As we can see from Figure 1 (above, using weighted data), none of the health conditions are common and approaching three fifths of people (58.7%) indicate having none of them. Asthma is the only condition that more than one in ten people (11.6%) have, though one in twelve (8.2%) have osteoarthritis. Between one in thirteen and one in twenty people have diabetes (7.7%), a mental health condition (7.0%), hearing impairment (6.0%), cancer (5.0%), or a form of arthritis that is not specifically listed (4.8%). The remaining thirteen conditions all have very small percentages of people who indicate having them. However, if we count how many conditions people have then we see that approaching three in ten people (28.7%) have one health condition, as shown in Figure 2 (below, also using weighted data). A further one in eleven people (8.8%) have two health conditions, whilst smaller percentages have three, four, or five conditions. Overall, then, more than two fifths of people (41.3%) have at least one of the health conditions that they were asked about. Not all of them feel that their daily lives are limited because of them but people with health conditions constitute a sizeable minority within the population.