The measurement of food insecurity among children

The prime objectives of the Office of Research are to improve international understanding of issues relating to children’s rights and to help facilitate full implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in developing, middle-income and industrialized countries. [...] The UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti and the Voices of the Hungry project of the FAO Statistics Division jointly conceived the idea of sponsoring a review of the literature on measurement of child food security. [...] The effectiveness of a global monitoring system rests on two components: measurement of child food insecurity that reliably and accurately captures the phenomenon, and a vehicle for delivering that measurement to samples that support reliable and accurate inference to the populations of interest. [...] There are currently four main tools for directly measuring and monitoring household food insecurity: the Household Food Security Scale developed by the United States Department of Agriculture and delivered through the Current Population Survey and other U. S. government surveys, the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) developed by the Voices of the Hungry [1] and delivered through the Gallup W [...] At the household level, food insecurity is characterized by four dimensions : 1) inadequate quantity of food, 2) inadequate quality of food, 3) psychological unacceptability of food and ways of obtaining food, and 4) social unacceptability of food and ways of obtaining food [19].