Household Hunger Scale

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.