Compare methods

	Household Hunger Scale	Reduced Coping Strategies Index
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2011	2008
Originator	Terri Ballard, Jennifer Coates, Anne Swindale & Megan Deitchler (FANTA)	Daniel Maxwell & Richard Caldwell (CARE / WFP)
Type	Short experience-based household hunger screening scale for cross-cultural use	Standardized weighted index of food-consumption coping behaviors
Seminal source	Ballard, T., Coates, J., Swindale, A., & Deitchler, M. (2011). Household Hunger Scale: Indicator Definition and Measurement Guide. Washington, DC: Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance II Project (FANTA-2), FHI 360.	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	HHS, FANTA Household Hunger Scale, Cross-Cultural Household Hunger Measure	rCSI, Reduced CSI, WFP Reduced Coping Strategies Index
Related	3	3
Summary	The Household Hunger Scale (HHS) is a short, experience-based food-deprivation indicator developed by FANTA and documented by Ballard, Coates, Swindale and Deitchler in 2011, designed specifically to be valid for cross-cultural comparison. Unlike longer access scales, it focuses on the three most severe manifestations of food insecurity — having no food in the house, going to sleep hungry, and going a whole day and night without eating — each with a frequency follow-up over a four-week recall. The three items are recoded into a score from zero to six and partitioned into little-to-no, moderate, and severe household hunger. Because Deitchler and colleagues validated these items across diverse settings, the HHS provides a simple, comparable measure of severe food deprivation suitable for use in food-insecure regions worldwide.	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.