History & Background
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This page provides the following information:
Early History
The food security statistics reported by ERS are based on a
survey measure developed by the U.S. Food Security Measurement
Project, an ongoing collaboration among Federal agencies, academic
researchers, and private commercial and nonprofit organizations.
The measure was developed in response to the National
Nutrition Monitoring and Related Research Act of 1990
(NNMRR).
The Ten-Year Comprehensive Plan developed under
that Act specified the following task: "Recommend a standardized
mechanism and instrument(s) for defining and obtaining data on the
prevalence of 'food insecurity' or 'food insufficiency' in the
United States and methodologies that can be used across the NNMRR
Program and at State and local levels."
Beginning in 1992, USDA staff reviewed the
existing research literature on the conceptual basis for measuring
food insecurity and on the practical problems of developing a
survey instrument for use in sample surveys at national, State, and
local levels.
In January 1994, USDA's Food and Nutrition
Service (FNS) joined with the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services' National Center for Health Statistics to sponsor a
National Conference on Food Security Measurement and
Research. The conference brought together leading academic
experts, private researchers, and key staff of the concerned
Federal agencies. The conference identified the appropriate
conceptual basis for a national measure of food insecurity. The
conference also reached a working agreement as to the best
operational form for implementing such a measure in national
surveys.
CPS Food Security Supplement
The U.S. Census Bureau carried out a cognitive assessment and
field test of the food security questionnaire. They finalized the
questionnaire and administered it as a supplement to the Current
Population Survey (CPS) of April 1995.
The Food Security Supplement was repeated again
in September 1996, April 1997, August 1998, April 1999, September
2000, April and December 2001, and annually in December since 2001.
Minor modifications to the questionnaire format and screening
procedures were made over the first several years, and a more
substantial revision in screening and format, designed to reduce
respondent burden and improve data quality, was introduced with the
August 1998 survey. However, the content of the 18 questions upon
which the U.S. Food Security Scale is based remained constant in
all years.
Development of the Household
Food Security Scale
Initial analysis of the 1995 data in
Household Food Security in the United States in 1995: Technical
Report of the Food Security Measurement Project was conducted by Abt Associates Inc. through a
cooperative venture with FNS, an interagency working group on food
security measurement, and other key researchers involved in
developing the questionnaire. The Abt team used nonlinear factor
analysis and other state-of-the-art statistical methods to produce
a scale that measures the severity of deprivation in basic food
needs as experienced by U.S. households. Extensive testing
established the validity and reliability of the scale and its
applicability across various household types in the broad national
sample.
Following collection of the September 1996 and April 1997 CPS
food security data, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. (MPR), under
a contract awarded by FNS, independently reproduced the results
from the 1995 CPS food security data, estimated prevalence rates of
food insecurity for 1996 and 1997, and assessed the stability and
robustness of the measurement model when applied to the separate
datasets. The MPR findings in Household Food Security in the United States,
1995-1997: Technical Issues and Statistical Report established the stability of the food security
measure over the 1995-97 period. That is, the relative severities
of the items were found to be nearly invariant across years and
across major population groups and household types.
ERS Sponsors the Food
Security Survey
In 1998, the Economic Research Service (ERS) assumed sponsorship
of the Census Bureau's annual food security survey and
responsibility for analyzing and reporting the data and for
coordinating ongoing USDA research on food security and food
security measurement.
ERS collaborated with MPR and FNS to develop and finalize
standardized procedures for calculating the household food security
scale and analyzed the data from 1998 and later years using these
procedures. ERS and IQ Solutions analyzed data from the 1998 and 1999
surveys,
found that the scale continued to be stable, and examined
additional technical measurement and estimation issues.
Committee on National
Statistics Reviews the Food Security Measure
In 2003-06 an expert panel convened by the Committee on National
Statistics (CNSTAT) of the National Academies conducted a thorough
review of the food security measurement methods. USDA requested the
review to ensure that the measurement methods USDA uses to assess
households' access-and lack of access-to adequate food and the
language used to describe those conditions are scientifically sound
and that they convey useful and relevant information to policy
officials and the public.
The panel convened by CNSTAT to conduct this study included
economists, sociologists, nutritionists, statisticians, and other
researchers. Two of the central issues the CNSTAT panel addressed
were:
- Are the concept and definition of hunger appropriate for the
policy context in which food security statistics are used?
- Is the relationship between hunger and food insecurity
appropriately represented in the language used to report food
security statistics?
The CNSTAT
panel recommended that USDA continue to measure and monitor
food insecurity regularly in a household survey, affirmed the
appropriateness of the general methodology currently used to
measure food insecurity, and suggested several ways in which the
methodology might be refined (contingent on confirmatory
research).
The CNSTAT panel recommended that USDA make a clear and explicit
distinction between food insecurity and hunger and consider
alternative labels to convey the severity of food insecurity
without using the word "hunger." USDA concurred with this
recommendation and, accordingly, introduced the new labels "low
food security" and "very low food security" to replace "food
insecurity without hunger" and "food insecurity with hunger,"
respectively. USDA is collaborating with partners in the food
security measurement community to explore how best to implement
other recommendations of the CNSTAT panel.
Other Surveys Collect Food
Security Data
The Federal food security measurement project has developed
standardized questionnaires and methods for editing and scoring to
produce household summary measures of food security status. These
modules are now in use in several national surveys including: