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	U.S. Household Food Security Survey Module	Household Hunger Scale
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Latent structure	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2000	2011
Originator	Gary Bickel, Mark Nord, William Hamilton et al. (USDA Federal Interagency Food Security Measurement Project)	Terri Ballard, Jennifer Coates, Anne Swindale & Megan Deitchler (FANTA)
Type	Experience-based household food security scale calibrated by Rasch measurement	Short experience-based household hunger screening scale for cross-cultural use
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.	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.
Aliases	HFSSM, USDA Household Food Security Survey Module, Core Food Security Module, US Food Security Scale	HHS, FANTA Household Hunger Scale, Cross-Cultural Household Hunger Measure
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 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.