The Differential Incidence and Severity of Food Insecurity by Racial, Ethnic, and Immigrant Groups over the Great Recession in the United States

摘要

Perennially, black- and Hispanic-headed households have substantially higher rates of food insecurity (e.g., 21.5 percent and 19.1 percent in 2015, respectively) than white-headed households (10 percent in 2015) in the United States (Coleman-Jensen et al. 2016). Minority groups have received considerable attention from policymakers and academics since they have higher rates of poverty and use public programs at rates greater than the majority populations (e.g., Currie 2003; Jensen 2002; Ratcliffe 2015). Food insecurity is a likely contributing factor to the disadvantage of those groups (Coleman-Jensen et al. 2016; Ratcliffe 2015).Therefore, a better understanding of these groups concerning their exposure to food insecurity and how public programs potentially aid them can suggest ways to orient those public programs to these groups more effectively. Though the literature on food insecurity is extensive (Gundersen, Kreider, and Pepper 2011; Ratcliffe et al. 2011; Wilde and Nord 2005), little research provides a nationally-representative picture of the incidence and severity of food insecurity by households of different races/ethnicities and immigrant status.An exception is Gundersen (2008), who finds that American Indians have higher levels of food insecurity than non-American Indians. Much of this research has focused on the role that the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) has on food insecurity or the effect of food insecurity and SNAP on health outcomes. Typically, researchers use demographic variables as controls where they are not the primary focus of analysis. We give explicit consideration to the demographic differences in exposure to food insecurity. At the same time, most existing studies focus on the incidence of food insecurity with a binary indicator, while the severity of that exposure has been largely ignored (Gundersen 2008; Gundersen, Kreider, and Pepper 2011). As we show below, groups that have a higher incidence of food insecurity do not necessarily have a higher severity of food insecurity.