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Abstract
Excerpts: This is the Final Report for the project, “Analysis of the Current Population Survey Data for Food Security and Hunger Measurement” conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. (MPR) for the USDA Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), beginning in 1997. The project provided USDA with technical support and statistical estimation work for analyzing the 1996 and 1997 data on food security collected in the U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey (CPS) Food Security Supplement. More broadly, the work examined a number of analytic and empirical issues relevant to analyzing the first three years of CPS food security data available—those for 1995, 1996, and 1997. The first section below provides background information about the analysis. Chapter II provides a brief summary of the past work in the food security area and of the methods currently being used to measure food security; it thus provides a context for the subsequent material. Chapter III presents results that describe the stability of the estimated food security scale across different years. Chapter IV provides a summary of “benchmark” methods that can be used to estimate the food security scale on different data sets and with different assumptions as to which parameters are to be held constant and which are not. Chapter V discusses issues related to adjusting the food security model over time, to accommodate both the availability of new data and possible developments in the underlying methodology. Chapter VI provides some broad conclusions about the food security scale.