The Relationship of Urbanization and Performance of Activity and Participation Functioning among Adults with Developmental Disabilities in Taiwan

Developmental disability is likely to be lifelong in nature and to result in substantial activity and societal participation limitations. The performance of individuals is related to the environment, supports, and urbanization of living cities. Most of the surveys for people with disabilities have not discussed the relationship between the cognitive impairment properties and performance of participation and activities functioning, and most cognitive impairments are regarded as having similar performance. The location of residence in childhood is mainly influenced by parents and main caregivers, but the factors related to the preferences of adults with cognitive impairment in the location of residence are more complicated. Objective(s): The aim was to explore and compare the relationships of the urbanization degree of their living cities and the functioning performance of daily living in various domains among adults with intellectual disability (ID), autism, and concomitant communicative impairment (CCI). Method: The cross-sectional study was applied, and the data was collected face-to-face by professionals in all authorized hospitals in Taiwan. The participants were 5374 adults with ID (n = 4455), autism (n = 670), CCI (n = 110) and combination disabilities (n = 139) which were according to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases 9th Revision (ICD-9) from a total of 167,069 adults with disabilities from the Disability Eligibility System (DES) in Taiwan between July 2012 and October 2013. The authors used the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0–36 item version of WHO (WHODAS 2.0-36 items) to measure performance and capability of daily living. Results and Conclusions: There were significant differences in age, gender, disabled severity, and the urbanization between all subgroups ( p < 0.05). After adjusting the age of all participators, the degree of urbanization just significantly affected the functioning score distribution in domain 1: cognition for an adult with ID, autism, and CCI; in domain 2, mobility for an adult with CCI and combination disability; in domain 3, self-care; domain 4, independent domains for ID ( p < 0.05). There were no significant differences between urbanization degree and functioning scores in all domains for adults with autism. All in all, only in groups with combination disability did we find that the worse the degree of impairment was, the lower the degree of urbanization of their place of residence was, and there was no such phenomenon in adults with autism and ID in our study.