A Consumer Food Data System for 2030 and Beyond (2020) / Chapter Skim
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4 Strategies to Strengthen the Infrastructure of a Consumer Food Data System
4 Strategies to Strengthen the Infrastructure of a Consumer Food Data System
Pages 105-136
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From page 105... ...
As part of this charge, the panel was asked "to identify data gaps and to anticipate how evolving policy priorities may affect data needs." Recognizing that the objective of the CFDS program is to advance understanding of food acquisition, behavior, and outcomes, the panel identified characteristics of a CFDS that is effective and useful for research and policy purposes. These include comprehensiveness, representativeness, timeliness, openness, flexibility, accuracy, suitability, and fiscal responsibility.
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From page 106... ...
Because consumer food choices respond to economic, policy, and environmental incentives, an effective food data system also requires access to comprehensive information on food prices, food policies, food outlets, and the spectrum of food choices within those outlets. Some granular data on prices, outlets, and choices can be obtained from surveys of markets, directly provided by food vendors, or from third-party private aggregators such as Nielsen and IRI.
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From page 107... ...
Many monitoring functions, including the measurement of program participation in food assistance in SNAP, WIC, and school meal programs, require data at a monthly frequency, while other monitoring, including the tracking of health and nutrition outcomes such as diabetes and obesity, is more slowmoving and can be sufficiently handled by annual data collection. Many evaluations of behavioral outcomes are also effectively conducted with annual data.
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From page 108... ...
-- a partnership between federal statistical agencies and leading research institutions in which secure facilities provide authorized access to restricted-use microdata for statistical purposes only.1 Further examples were proposed by the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking.2 ERS offered an alternative to the FSRDC system for those who wished to use restricted versions of National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS)
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From page 109... ...
ERS's development and inclusion of the Household Food Security Module as a supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS; prompted by a congressional request) was crucial in that it unleashed an entirely new research and policy agenda.
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From page 110... ...
Linking survey data to administrative data offers the prospect of better measurement of household participation in assistance programs when links are of high quality, but administrative data, which generally originate from state governments, are not devoid of measurement error. Scanner data on persons and establishments, while rich in granularity, also suffer from underreporting of certain items and often lack coverage of certain populations, notably low-income people and those residing in rural areas.
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From page 111... ...
the changes in consumer food shopping modes (e.g., increased food shopping online) , which will likely continue to elevate the importance to researchers of nonsurvey data sources such as proprietary data and administrative data; and (ii)
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From page 112... ...
We discuss each of these separately, as well as the importance of integration. A consumer food data system, such as that maintained by ERS, contains information at the individual, household, and firm level from surveys, administrative data systems, and commercial proprietary data that are representative and accurate at the national, state, and local levels, as demanded by the purposes to which they are put.
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From page 113... ...
. RECOMMENDATION 4.1: A key task for the Consumer Food Data System is to assess the quality of survey data across sources and over time.
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From page 114... ...
Two examples of high-priority topics that will continue to require survey investments are the monitoring of household food security outcomes and measurements of the impact of nutrition assistance programs on food insecurity and dietary intakes. As discussed in section 4.6, blended approaches, in which survey data are combined with administrative and commercial data, hold great promise for creating added value and lowering costs per observation.
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From page 115... ...
To the extent that FoodAPS is intended to support research beyond monitoring of food acquisitions and related outcomes, such as longitudinal and causal research, planners can learn from other surveys that match a sample to longitudinal administrative data both retrospectively and prospectively. For example, the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP)
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From page 116... ...
However, it has been expensive to get enough eligible nonparticipants in the sample to make detailed comparisons with participants. It may be more efficient in future rounds of FoodAPS to go even further in the use of administrative and commercial data to create the initial frame, which would cut the cost of screening the non-SNAP participant samples.
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From page 117... ...
RECOMMENDATION 4.5: ERS should advocate for continued fund ing of data collection, and research on food security should be treated as a high priority in the Current Population Survey, National Health Interview Survey, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. As discussed in Chapter 2, food security is emphasized in many ERS and FNS-funded modules, in part because the agency is mandated to collect data on food adequacy and has done so on a regular basis for many years.5 The Food Security Supplement to the CPS was prompted by the National 5 An earlier Committee on National Statistics report (NRC, 2006)
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From page 118... ...
The 18-item module with a 12-month reference period is preferred both because of the importance of monitoring childspecific exposure to food insecurity and because most of the survey questions on program participation, income, consumption, health, and other domains refer to the prior 12 months (or prior calendar year) and beyond.7 RECOMMENDATION 4.6: The Economic Research Service should recommend that the 10-item, 30-day measure currently used in the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey and the National Health Interview Survey should be replaced in future itera tions of these surveys with the 18-item, 12-month module.
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From page 119... ...
Administrative data may also be used to enhance the value of survey data or in combination with other administrative data in integrated approaches. Optimizing the Next Generation Data Platform A further advantage of administrative data, relative to survey data, is that they exist as a byproduct of routine processes within federal, state, and local governments for such programs as SNAP, WIC, school meals, and others.
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From page 120... ...
Unfortunately, the usual application process for using the FSRDCs does not give the academic and policy research community easy access to component administrative data and merged administrative and survey data from the Next Generation Data Platform for the SNAP and WIC programs. Existing Census-ERS-FNS data were created with ERS funding, but this was accomplished under the Census Bureau's Census Act authority, so any project using these data must generate a direct benefit to the Census Bureau.
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From page 121... ...
As described above, the Foundations Act should make data from other agencies available for federal statistical purposes. This could bring information on workforce, housing, justice, and education issues from administrative data into FED studies of program participation.
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From page 122... ...
The promise of these types of links can be seen in the two studies using linked NHIS/NHANES-Medicaid data cited above. For integrating surveys with administrative data, and possibly commercial data, the FED should anticipate data uses in the spirit of small-area estimation.
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From page 123... ...
4.4. OPPORTUNITIES FROM AND CHALLENGES WITH EXPANDING USE OF COMMERCIAL DATA A forward looking CFDS must anticipate changes in food acquisition among specific groups and be capable of measuring new patterns of food acquisition.
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From page 124... ...
Despite their attractive qualities, the value of commercial data can be limited by access issues, coverage and representation bias, lack of documentation or transparency of methods, limited scope of variables, and privacy concerns. As a general class, such commercial data can be thought of as "organic data" as opposed to "design data" (Groves, 2011)
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From page 125... ...
. As reviewed in Chapter 2 and summarized in Table 4.2, ERS routinely draws from commercial databases in its ongoing research and evaluation work on consumer food, nutrition, and health.
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From page 126... ...
Firm-originated data can also be leveraged to evaluate information on food away from home in the IRI Consumer Panel. While the detailed Consumer Panel data are a crucial input for many studies of consumer choice and the food environment, they do not have information on food away from home that is not acquired at food stores.
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From page 127... ...
should exploit new ideas for integrating commercial data into the Consumer Food Data System. For example, to produce a long "time series" of data on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
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From page 128... ...
• Linking stores listed in the household Consumer Panel with data generated by those establishments. • Acquiring new data from vendors, if feasible, on SNAP and WIC variables that are less restricted in use than existing consumer and firm household data.14 • Extracting from commercial data sources a variable on the pay ment method to infer usage of cash, credit, coupons, and SNAP or WIC benefits.
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From page 129... ...
It is also important to construct weights to make the population of participants demographi cally representative of the national population.16 Widespread use of commercial data as a replacement for well-designed, representative surveys and more robust and accessible administrative data is still some distance in the future. Nonetheless, ERS has an admirable tradition of using commercial data while also comparing findings, totals, and coverage with other sources.
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From page 130... ...
Standards should be identified and adhered to for gauging the quality of stand-alone data and linkages and to assess privacy risks associated with all components of the Consumer Food Data System. Data Use and Access Commercial data are purchased by statistical agencies with the intention that they can be effectively used in a strategy that improves the accuracy or breadth of information, reduces costs or survey burden, or both.
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From page 131... ...
More open access to these data would increase knowledge. RECOMMENDATION 4.12: The commercial data in the Consumer Food Data System (CFDS)
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From page 132... ...
For example, the Census Bureau's American Community Survey has been combined with administrative SNAP records and the SNAP rules database. That linkage is at the household level, which has allowed researchers to answer questions such as, what is the impact of SNAP policy changes on program participation and employment outcomes?
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From page 133... ...
This should include information generated in activi ties funded or sponsored by ERS and the Food Nutrition Service, in cluding the food assistance programs and other programs whose output is included in the Consumer Food Data System. The FSRDC network has a well-established set of enclaves hosting sensitive data.
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From page 134... ...
. The following issues have been observed in earlier data-sharing efforts and will need to be addressed by ERS FED to increase data access.
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From page 135... ...
Food Economics Division should create a data council to prioritize which data should be created and specify access rules while ensuring that the Consumer Food Data System addresses ongoing U.S. Depart ment of Agriculture research data needs.
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From page 136... ...
recommendations that the CFDS systematically focus on serving monitoring needs (e.g., measuring food security consistently) and causal research needs through longitudinal designs, and (5)
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