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	U.S. Household Food Security Survey Module	Food Insecurity Experience Scale
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Latent structure	Latent structure
Year of origin	2000	2018
Originator	Gary Bickel, Mark Nord, William Hamilton et al. (USDA Federal Interagency Food Security Measurement Project)	Carlo Cafiero, Sara Viviani & Mark Nord (FAO Voices of the Hungry)
Type	Experience-based household food security scale calibrated by Rasch measurement	Experience-based latent-trait food insecurity scale estimated by Rasch modeling
Seminal source	Bickel, G., Nord, M., Price, C., Hamilton, W., & Cook, J. (2000). Guide to Measuring Household Food Security, Revised 2000. Alexandria, VA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service.	Cafiero, C., Viviani, S., & Nord, M. (2018). Food security measurement in a global context: The food insecurity experience scale. Measurement, 116, 146-152.
Aliases	HFSSM, USDA Household Food Security Survey Module, Core Food Security Module, US Food Security Scale	FIES, FAO Food Insecurity Experience Scale, Voices of the Hungry Scale, Experience-based Food Insecurity Scale
Related	3	3
Summary	The U.S. Household Food Security Survey Module (HFSSM) is the standard instrument for measuring food insecurity in the United States, developed in the 1990s by the USDA-led Federal Interagency Food Security Measurement Project and documented in Bickel, Nord, Price, Hamilton and Cook's 2000 Guide to Measuring Household Food Security. It is an experience-based scale: a set of ten adult-referenced and eight child-referenced questions, with frequency follow-ups, that ask whether households cut back on food, skipped meals, or went hungry because they lacked money for food. Responses are calibrated with a Rasch measurement model onto a single severity continuum, and households are classified into high, marginal, low, and very low food security, the categories behind the annual national food-security statistics.	The Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) is an experience-based metric of food insecurity built on eight yes/no survey questions and calibrated with a Rasch (one-parameter logistic) item response model. Developed by FAO's Voices of the Hungry project and formalized by Cafiero, Viviani and Nord in 2018, the FIES treats food insecurity as a single latent trait that ranges from anxiety about access, through compromises in food quality and quantity, to going without eating for a whole day. Because the items are calibrated to a common metric and equated onto a global reference scale, the FIES allows comparable estimates of the prevalence of moderate and severe food insecurity across countries and over time, and it is the official instrument used to monitor SDG indicator 2.1.2.