Introducing a Simple Measure of Household Hunger for Cross-Cultural Use

In other words, for a tool to be cross-culturally valid it must be valid in all settings and the mean- ing of the items that make up the tool and their relation to the experience of inad- equate food access must also be the same across all settings. [...] A full description of these methods is available elsewhere.20 Here, we limit the description to a discussion about the general principles of the Rasch model, to highlight the ways in which the model is appropriate for assess- ing the cross-cultural validity of a multiple item scale, such as the HFIAS. [...] In many circumstances, however, categorical variables are easier to interpret items that make up a scale to be tested, since the severity parameter estimated for each item is invariant to the particular group of households that make up the sample.23 CROSS-CULTURAL VALIDITY RESULTS To explore the cross-cultural validity of the HFIAS, we first applied the Rasch model to data from the full HFIAS, con. [...] West Bank/Gaza Strip 10 WHAT IS THE RELEVANCE OF THE HHS? Although the subset of HFIAS items that make up the HHS are among the more severe experiences of inadequate house- hold food access, analysis of the seven datasets used in the validation study clearly showed that the range of sever- ity covered by the HHS is program- and policy-relevant (Table 7). [...] The use of the HHS should therefore not preclude the concurrent use of a culturally specific measure of food access or food deprivation in those contexts or settings where a valid, cultur- ally specific measure of food insecurity or hunger is available or is in the process of being developed.