Food Insecurity and Hunger in the United States An Assessment of the Measure (2006) / Chapter Skim
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4 Survey Measurement of Food Insecurity and Hunger
4 Survey Measurement of Food Insecurity and Hunger
Pages 55-70
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From page 55... ...
CURRENT APPROACH TO MEASUREMENT Design of the Current Population Survey As summarized in Chapter 2, the Food Security Supplement (FSS) is conducted as a supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS)
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From page 56... ...
The reinterview of part of the sampled cases allows estimation of within-household variance for the food security measures.1 Researchers in the Economic Research Service (ERS) of USDA are currently using the panel feature of the CPS to look at food insecurity of households as they approach the beginning of a food stamp spell, a period of one or more months during which a household receives food stamps every month.
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From page 57... ...
4. Food sufficiency and food security (this section includes the 18 food security and hunger questions that are used to calculate the household food security scale)
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From page 58... ...
Separate scales are developed for the different reference periods, although only the 12-month scale is commonly used in household food security analyses. The questions that comprise the household food security scale are shown in Box 2-1.
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From page 59... ...
-- in this case, the components of food security, food insecurity, and food insecurity with hunger. This section considers the relationships among the three major categories of food insecurity and hunger (whether the household experienced uncertainty, insufficiency in quality of food, or reduced food intake or the feeling of hunger)
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From page 60... ...
a 1998 86.5 9.8 3.7 1999 88.5 8.6 2.9 2000 87.9 9.0 3.1 2001 87.8 8.9 3.3 2002 87.5 9.1 3.4 2003 87.3 9.3 3.4 2004 86.8 9.5 3.7 Adults (by food security status of household) a 1998 88.8 7.9 3.3 1999 90.5 7.0 2.5 2000 89.9 7.3 2.8 2001 89.8 7.3 3.0 2002 89.5 7.5 3.0 2003 89.2 7.7 3.1 2004 88.7 7.9 3.4 did not last and they did not have money to get more.
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aThe food security survey measures food security status at the household level. Not all individuals residing in food-insecure households are appropriately characterized as food insecure.
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From page 62... ...
USDA's food security scale measures the severity of food insecurity in surveyed households and classifies their food security status during the previous year. The frequency of food insecurity and the duration of spells of insecurity are not assessed directly in the HFSSM questions used to classify households by food security status.
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From page 63... ...
Any revised or additional measures should be appropriately tested be fore implementing in the Household Food Security Survey Module. QUESTION DESIGN ISSUES The focus of this section is on the validity and reliability of the individual questions that comprise the HFSSM.
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From page 64... ...
Similarly, if the concept of insufficient intake or hunger is an individually experienced phenomenon, questions should address the individual.4 In addition to the conceptual and analytic issues noted above, the specification of the reference person in the Food Security Supplement poses several challenges for respondents: · The unit referred to by the question changes across questions. The unit is variously the household (e.g., "Was that often true, sometimes true, or never true for you/your household?
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From page 65... ...
SURVEY MEASUREMENT OF FOOD INSECURITY AND HUNGER 65 months, since December of last year, did you ever cut the size of (your child's/any of the children's) meals because there wasn't enough money for food?
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From page 66... ...
also seems unsuited to proxy reports, but it is asked about as though it is a household-level concept. Reference Periods A large body of empirical literature exists that examines the relationship between length of the reference period and the level of measurement error (see for example, Bound, Brown, and Mathiowetz, 2001)
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From page 67... ...
were similarly classified for the 30-day period prior to the survey.5 The impact of the length of the reference period and confusion about its boundaries on the quality of the resulting data depends partly on the actual organization of the episodes of food insecurity in respondents' lives. Both the difficulty of the reporting task and the organization of the respondents' experiences will influence which heuristics respondents use to supplement their memory in constructing answers.
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From page 68... ...
. Three follow-up questions ask respondents to assess whether the behavior occurred "almost every month, some months but not every month, or in only 1 or 2 months." Several of the questions in the FSS use the response options "often true, sometimes true, never true." For the remaining items, respondents answer using a dichotomous yes/no format.
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From page 69... ...
and on a specific reference period, and developing response options that most closely map to the respondent's representation of the behavior (or attitude) are all means by which questions can be designed to reduce cognitive burden and, as a result, improve the validity and reliability of the measures.
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From page 70... ...
Items that were affirmed for the 12-month reference period could be followed up, focusing exclusively on a 30-day reference period. Recommendation 4-2: USDA should revise the wording and order ing of the questions in the Household Food Security Survey Mod ule.
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