Testing the Robustness of the Food Security Scale With More Recent CPS Data

摘要

Abhijay Prakash, Larry Radbill, and Allen Schirm, my colleagues at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., contributed to this work. Earlier Chris Hamilton described the Rasch model that provides the framework for the food security research that Abt Associates, Inc., did for FNS. A fundamental tenet of the model is that the underlying food security scale stays constant over time and that individual items stay more or less in the same place on the scale over time. It is important to test this underlying hypothesis to make sure it holds true in the current application. Under contract with FNS, we looked at whether the metric appears to be the same over time. Chris's early research was based on the 1995 data. Since multiple years of data are now available,our mandate was also to use the 1996 and 1997 data to expand the previous analysis of levels of food security to include a longer time period.