The Household Hunger Scale (HHS) is based on the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) but has been modified to make it more applicable across cultures.  The HHS  has a new indicator that measures household hunger in highly food insecure areas. 

The HHS is most appropriate when large proportions of households and individuals experience food deprivation and actual hunger. It can be used to:

• monitor the prevalence of hunger over time across locations and  assess progress towards meeting international development commitments;
• assess the food security situation and provide evidence for developing policies and programs to increase food security;
•  monitor and evaluate the impact of anti-hunger policies and programmes, including those that are funded by a specific donors in various locations; 
• provide information for early warning systems, nutrition and food security surveillance and standardized food security / humanitarian phase classifications such at the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification ( IPC).

A Note on the Cross-Cultural Use of the HHS

In the FAO/FANTA study, the HHS, consisting of the final three HFIAS questionnaire items, was the only combination of questions that showed internal validity for all data sets. This indicates that they were most appropriate for measuring severe food insecurity across different cultures.

The HHS is unique compared to other food insecurity indicators in that it has been developed and validated for cross-cultural use.  Being able to describe the food security status of different populations in a comparable way facilitates decision making. It also provides the basis for designing, implementing, and evaluating appropriate policy and program interventions to address food insecurity in vulnerable population groups. See:

http://www.fantaproject.org/downloads/pdfs/HHS_Validation_Report_May2010.pdf

A Technical Note on the development of the HHS is available at http://cit.aed.org/Publications/loader.cfm?url=/commonspot/security/getfile.cfm&pageid=39566

Any requests for information on the HFIAS or the HHS may be addressed to terri.ballard@fao.org.

Each of the three HHS items has two components:

- “occurrence” (no/yes) and

- “frequency-of-occurrence” (rarely/sometimes/often).

The HHS Score and household classification

While the HHS questionnaire module includes three frequencies-of-occurrence options (“rarely”, “sometimes” and “often”), for scoring the HHS the first two frequencies are combined, resulting in two frequencies-of-occurrence (“rarely/sometimes” and “often”). 

It will be necessary to recode the two parts of each of the HHS item (occurrence and frequency-of-occurrence) into new variables that have a value of 0 for “never occurred”, 1 for having occurred “rarely” or “sometimes”, and 2 for having occurred “often”.  The HHS score is sum of the three recoded variables and will range from 0 to 6.

The HHS score is the basis for categorizing households with respect to household hunger. To tabulate the categorical HHS indicator, two different cut-off values (>1 and >3) are applied to the HHS score.  The three household hunger categories are shown below.

The way people conceptualise time (in this case a  30 day period or four weeks) may be culturally determined, thus careful linguistic adaptation will help researchers choose the most appropriate term to describe this time period.