Reduced Coping Strategies Index

The full CSI inventories all the coping behaviors a household uses in a given context and weights them using severity weights elicited locally, giving a rich, context-tailored picture but one that is not comparable across settings. The reduced CSI fixes on five consumption-based behaviors that recur across cultures and applies universal weights, deliberately trading local detail for cross-context comparability. Use the full CSI for a deep single-context assessment and the rCSI when you need to compare across populations or over time.

The weights reflect how severe each behavior signals food stress to be. Restricting adults' food intake so that children can eat is treated as the most severe and carries the highest weight, borrowing food carries an intermediate weight, and eating less-preferred foods, limiting portions, and reducing meals carry the base weight. Multiplying frequency by these weights means that a household resorting to more serious strategies scores higher even at the same frequency, so the index captures intensity of coping rather than merely how many behaviors are used.

Yes. A low score can occur not only because a household is food-secure but also because it has already exhausted these coping options, or because it is coping through livelihood strategies — selling assets, taking on debt, migrating — that the rCSI does not measure. For this reason the rCSI should be interpreted alongside consumption indicators like the Food Consumption Score, severity measures like the Household Hunger Scale, and information on livelihood coping, rather than read in isolation.