Food Insecurity Related Measures

On August 30th, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) presented a webinar with researchers from the Gretchen Swanson Center for Nutrition on food insecurity measures developed to augment the USDA Household Food Security Survey.

The new tools developed at Gretchen Swanson (and available for public use on their website) are designed to help organizations understand different aspects of food and nutrition security among the people they serve.

These measures fit well with the Hunger Vital Sign (HVS) 2-question risk screen, discussed in detail on our Hunger Vital Sign explainer series. A strength of HVS as a screen is that it can be the first step along many different pathways - it tests whether a respondent is at risk for food insecurity, without applying additional filters such as financial measures, eligibility for specific assistance programs, or dietary assessments for specific clinical risks. A practice using the screen can tailor follow up to the programs they have available for next step referral and assistance.

One problem is that screens like HVS do not offer insight into best practices or standardization of those next step questions. What are the key domains to ask about? How to frame the follow up questions? How to make the answers comparable across different sites? The Gretchen Swanson measures can help organizations design those additional dimensions to their food insecurity screening systems.

The NIFA webinar provides a detailed, focused introduction to the project. It does use some technical language, and for those who want an introduction to the key research concepts mentioned and context for how they are used, we recommend the SIREN “State of the Science” report on social screening in health care settings.