Wixon and Strand 2013 — Identifying SSA's Sequential Disability Determination Steps

Summary

A 16-page methodological reference note from the Social Security Administration's (SSA) Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics. Documents how the five-step sequential disability determination process maps onto the Regulation Basis Code (RBC) in the SSA-831 administrative data file, with frequency distributions for Disability Insurance (DI) disabled workers, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) adults, and SSI children using 2010 data. Primary purpose: to help researchers parse Disability Determination Services (DDS) allow/deny decisions by step and basis, enabling consistent coding across studies.

Key Claims

• The disability determination process is explicitly designed as a screening strategy: screens 1–3 handle the easy majority (Substantial Gainful Activity (SGA) denial, not-severe denial, clear Listing allowance); Steps 4–5 handle the residual "troublesome" cases requiring individualized evaluation.
• In 2010, Step 5 (capacity for any work) accounted for 42.8% of all DDS DI determinations — by far the largest share — dwarfing Step 3 (Listings allowance, 13.6%) and Step 2 (not severe, 15.8%).
• Medical allowances (Step 3, Listings-based) represent 13.6% of DDS DI decisions; medical-vocational allowances (Step 5) represent 16.8%. Vocational considerations produce more allowances than medical Listings alone.
• Step 1 (SGA) denials are almost entirely made at SSA field offices and are not recorded in DDS data; the 831 file captures virtually none of them (165 out of 2.4M records, or 0.0%).
• The RBC is recorded in the National Disability Determination Services System (NDDSS) and flows into the 831 file; it covers DDS initial determinations and reconsiderations only — not Administrative Law Judge (ALJ), Appeals Council, or federal court decisions.
• For SSI children, the determination process has no Steps 4–5; after a not-severe denial, the only path to allowance is meeting/equaling the Listings (Step 3a) or functionally equaling them across six domains of functioning (Step 3b).

Concepts Introduced or Extended

• SSA Sequential Determination Process
• Regulation Basis Code
• Substantial Gainful Activity
• Listing of Impairments
• Residual Functional Capacity
• Vocational Grid
• Disability Insurance Program

Entities Mentioned

• Bernard Wixon
• Alexander Strand
• Social Security Administration

Quotes

"The idea was to screen quickly the large majority of cases that could be allowed on reasonably objective medical tests and then deal individually with the troublesome cases that didn't pass the screen." — Robert M. Ball (1978), quoted in Wixon and Strand

My Take

This is a technical reference note, not a substantive research paper. Its contribution is documentation, not analysis. The key value for this wiki: it provides the canonical step-by-step account of the determination process with actual 2010 frequencies, showing that Step 5 (the vocational grid zone) is where the bulk of adjudication happens. This directly contextualizes the Meseguer finding about the growing share of vocational-based awards — it is not a marginal category; it is the modal outcome of DDS adjudication.