Compare methods

	Food Consumption Score	Reduced Coping Strategies Index
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2008	2008
Originator	World Food Programme, Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (VAM)	Daniel Maxwell & Richard Caldwell (CARE / WFP)
Type	Weighted food-group frequency index of household food consumption	Standardized weighted index of food-consumption coping behaviors
Seminal source	World Food Programme (2008). Food Consumption Analysis: Calculation and Use of the Food Consumption Score in Food Security Analysis. Rome: WFP Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (VAM) Technical Guidance Sheet.	Maxwell, D., & Caldwell, R. (2008). The Coping Strategies Index: A Tool for Rapid Measurement of Household Food Security and the Impact of Food Aid Programs in Humanitarian Emergencies. Field Methods Manual, 2nd Edition. Atlanta & Nairobi: CARE / WFP / Feinstein International Center, Tufts University & TANGO International.
Aliases	FCS, WFP Food Consumption Score, Weighted Food Group Frequency Score	rCSI, Reduced CSI, WFP Reduced Coping Strategies Index
Related	3	3
Summary	The Food Consumption Score (FCS) is the World Food Programme's standard household food-security indicator, defined in its 2008 VAM technical guidance. It is a weighted measure of dietary diversity and frequency: enumerators record how many days in the past week a household consumed each of a set of standard food groups, those frequencies are capped at seven and multiplied by weights reflecting each group's nutritional importance, and the weighted sum yields a score from zero to 112. Households are then classified as having poor, borderline, or acceptable food consumption using standard thresholds. Validated against caloric and other food-security measures by Wiesmann and colleagues at IFPRI, the FCS is widely used in emergency and development food-security assessments because it is fast, cheap, and proxies both diet quality and adequacy.	The Reduced Coping Strategies Index (rCSI) is a standardized, cross-context food-security indicator distilled from the Coping Strategies Index methodology of Maxwell and Caldwell. Where the full Coping Strategies Index inventories many context-specific coping behaviors with locally derived weights, the reduced version fixes on five consumption-based strategies — eating less-preferred foods, borrowing food, limiting portion size, restricting adults' intake so children can eat, and reducing the number of meals — each with a universal severity weight. Multiplying the number of days in the past week each strategy was used by its weight and summing gives a score from zero to 56. Because the strategies and weights are fixed, the rCSI is comparable across populations and countries, making it a widely used quick gauge of food-access stress.