Living with disability series: Defining disability in the Participation and Activity Limitation Survey

This first article in the "Living with disability" series briefly explores the evolution of theories about disability and outline contemporary thinking about how to define disability. It then compares data from the 2001 and the 2006 Participation and Activity Limitation Surveys (PALS) to see how the incidence of disability is growing in Canada, and identify the proportion of that growth that is due to changing public perceptions of disability.