Excerpts: Food insecurity is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon which varies through a continuum of successive stages as the condition becomes more severe. Each stage consists of characteristic conditions and experiences of food insufficiency to fully meet the basic needs of household members, and of the behavioral responses of household members to these conditions. A variety of indicators is needed to capture the various combinations of food conditions, experiences, and behaviors that, as a group, characterize each such stage. This is what the 18-item "core module" set of indicators provides. The chapters below describe some of the characteristic aspects of the continuum of food insecurity and hunger, and Exhibit 3-2 (p.32) illustrates graphically the relationship of the food security measure to this continuum. An even larger, more detailed indicator set than the 18-item standard U.S. food security scale might do an even better job of measuring the severity of food insecurity/hunger--e.g., it could distinguish more fully among the various time paths of the experience (cyclical, episodic, prolonged, brief but intense, etc.) and among the alternative behavioral paths that reveal the various coping strategies that households employ in attempting to deal with food-resource inadequacy. However, for the main purpose of assessing the prevalence of food insecurity/hunger at each of its several measurable levels of severity among U.S. households, the 18-item core module has been shown to be a stable, robust, and reliable measurement tool. The Core Module has been designed, not only for use in national surveys, but also for local groups wanting to determine the extent and severity of food insecurity and hunger within their own communities, using a technically well grounded and tested method to produce local prevalence estimates comparable with national and state-level standard benchmark figures. Local studies using either the Core Module or the standard 6-item subset can play a key role in documenting the presence of hunger in the community as measured under standard national practice, in providing a sound base for broader community needs assessment, and in helping focus attention on unmet food-security needs within the community.