Measuring food insecurity: Can an indicator based on localized coping behaviors be used to compare across contexts?

Dietary diversity and related factors among lactating women visiting public health facilities in Aksum town, Tigray, Northern Ethiopia

“…It has demonstrated that dietary diversity was significantly associated with the wealth status of the study participants; as the wealth index increased the likelihood of consuming diversified food have been observed to increase. A study in low and middle income countries also indicated that higher socio-economic status was associated with higher diet diversity score [33]. This could be due to the fact that low income earners recognized to be negatively affected on their preference of quality and quantity of diversified food groups consumed in their feeding arrangements attributable to income.…”

Impact of tissue culture banana technology on farm household income and food security in Kenya

“…The most common measurement approaches at the micro level build on dietary recalls, anthropometric indicators, or health data, which have also been used for impact assessment in a few studies (Babatunde and Qaim, 2010;Ecker and Qaim, 2010;Haddad et al, 1998;Rusike et al, 2010). There are also studies that try to measure food insecurity through data on household coping strategies (Maxwell et al, 1999;Maxwell et al, 2008). However, all these approaches have their methodological and empirical problems, and they are data-intensive and relatively costly to implement (de Haen et al, 2011).…”

Using panel data to estimate the effect of rainfall shocks on smallholders food security and vulnerability in rural Ethiopia

“…These three components, though they are theoretically hypothesized to reflect different dimensions of food security, in actual terms are indeed not separate but interlinked. Maxwell et al (2008) describe the frequently available and utilized indicators which potentially measure food security as the following: nutritional status, actual food consumption at the household level by a 24-hr recall, coping strategies index, as well as proxy indicators such as calorie intake, household income, productive assets, food shortage, under 5 nutritional status, dietary diversity, and household food insecurity access scale. Although these indicators reasonably capture and designate a small portion of the problem, they do not provide a comprehensive picture.…”