Coping Strategies Index

The original context-specific CSI uses a list of coping behaviours and severity weights derived from local qualitative work, making it sensitive to a particular setting but not comparable across settings. The reduced CSI (rCSI) standardises five specific behaviours — eating less-preferred foods, borrowing food, limiting portion size, restricting adult intake, and reducing the number of meals — with fixed universal severity weights, so scores can be compared across different populations and aggregated for monitoring.

For each coping behaviour, the household reports how many of the past seven days it used that behaviour (0–7). This frequency is multiplied by the behaviour's severity weight, and the weighted frequencies are summed across all behaviours to produce the CSI or reduced CSI score. A higher score means more frequent and more severe coping, indicating greater food insecurity; scores are then tracked over time or banded into severity categories.

Yes. Because the index measures the use of coping strategies, a household that has already exhausted its options — sold its assets, used up borrowing capacity, or reached the most extreme behaviours — may report fewer or less-frequent strategies even as its situation worsens, causing the score to plateau or fall. For this reason the CSI is best interpreted alongside other indicators and asset-depletion or livelihood-coping measures rather than in isolation.