Table 4.

Summary of characterization of food security indicators reflecting Coping Strategies and Anthropometry Measures

Indicators	Description/method	Recall period	Level of analysis	Dimension covered	Components covered	Possible purpose	Validity and Reliability	Data requirement and availability	Strengths and weaknesses
Coping Strategy Index (CSI) (Maxwell and Caldwell [37])	Assess what people do when they cannot access enough food A total of 12 to 15 coping strategies are identified through focus groups, and these strategies are assigned into one of the four categories: Dietary change, Short-term measures to increase food availability, Short-term measures to decrease the number of people to feed and Rationing Calculated as a weighted average of the frequency of the coping strategies as: ${\mathit{CSI}}_i=\sum w_j{S}_{\mathit{ij}}$, where $w_j$ is the weight assigned to jth coping strategy ($S_{\mathit{ij}}$) used by the ith household. The weight ($w_j$) ranges between 1 (least severe category) to 4 (most severe coping behaviour)	7 day	Household	Access	All	Analysis of causes and consequences of FI, Impact evaluation, Monitoring Early warning	Valid, but reliability not checked [10]	Data collection on a series of questions on how households are responding to food shortages, through focus group discussions	Relatively simple and allows rapid assessment. Yet, it is a context-specific measure, and relatively expensive. Also, no standardised cut-off points
Reduced CSI	Same with CSI, but allows FS comparison across different contexts by using five predefined coping strategies, with universal set of severity weightings: Eating less-preferred foods (1.0), Borrowing food/money from friends and relatives (2.0), Limiting portions at mealtime (1.0), Limiting adult intake (3.0), and Reducing the number of meals per day (1.0). The weighted sum of the frequencies of these five strategies (0–56) used for assigning households	7 day	Household	Access	Quantity, Quality, Preference	Surveillance, in the early stages of FS crises, and can also be combined with the HHS for analysing serious and prolonged FS crises	Valid, but reliability not checked [10]	Data collection on the five predefined strategies on how households are responding to food shortages, through focus group discussions	Standardised for different contexts, relatively simple and allows rapid assessment. Yet, relatively expensive, and no agreed threshold/cut-off for interpreting the scores
Anthropometry measures	-Assessing individuals’ nutritional outcomes in relation to the height, weight and body size of individuals - Simple calculations, and Z-score with cut-off points	–	Individual	Utilisation	Quantity, quality, safety	-Measuring the effect of undernutrition on individuals’ health and wellbeing - Mapping of nutritional security -Evaluating relief and emergency programs	Reliable and valid	WHO; Demographic and Health Surveys; Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys	Highly standardized, allow mapping of nutritional security at national and local levels. Yet, they are indirect measure of FS, generally expensive and time consuming [38]

FS food security, FI food insecurity uncategorized references