(Source: gcjgcytcghv)
Update 28/7/2011
The Household Food Insecurity Access Scale is a test that measures the degree to which a household may have difficulty providing enough desirable and nutritious for its members. It’s supposed to be administered to the “head of household”, meaning the person who provides the economic purchasing power for food in the household.
I’m breaking the rules a little and giving it to the primary adults in the household. Usually a male and a female. Guess what, the results are polarized.
So the anthropologically interesting thing here is, why ? How can one household have two separate scores?
Could be a number of things, pride may be getting in the way of validity, could be there’s some rationalization going on, could be social desirability, but so far the results are consistent: men have a higher food security score than woman in the same household.
What I’m going to begin exploring over the next few weeks in my interviews is a phenomenological explanation for this. My hypothesis is that though men are the primary economic providers for the household, the women carry the responsibility of hospitality and nutritional health for the household. They purchase and prepare the food, their labor is in it, therefore they are more emotionally connected to the ebb and flow of food availability than the men. It could be just old fashion rationalizing
Why does this matter?
One reason is because at the most basic level, stress and food both deal directly with how the body relates to energy. Many of the chronic health problems and diet related diseases that are related to food insecurity are also related to chronic stress. Sure, they’re separate systems, but there is a great deal of overlap in their functions. Think of it like this: the bank and the electric company are separate entity, but if you don’t pay your electric bill, they turn off the lights.
Another reason this matters is because this test is used around the world to gather data on food insecurity, and it may be falling short in detecting what’s really going on.
My preliminary work shows that some people seem to be better at others at buffeting against the effects of food insecurity and stress. So we’re trying to figure out what accounts for the difference - or “what are people doing right?” It may be that some people have better coping mechanisms than others, or it may be that this test isn’t as reliable in this area as it is in others.
So next up:
1) Probe for explanations on the differences in the intra-household HFIAS scores
2) Ask people about their experiences taking the HFIAS. What is it like to be asked 9 different ways if you can provide food for your house?
Stay tuned!
This is a great conversation starter for talking about the differences between objectivity and subjectivity - how perception is shaped by context and biology.
Statistics are like a bikini: What they show is interesting, but what they hide is vital.
Field work
Raining in Costa Rica today. Got a bunch of surveys and interviews completed though. Making progress!
The lines between states and even countries are pretty arbitrary: The ties you have with people 50 miles away aren’t going to be too-much affected by some imaginary line drawn up 200 years ago. What if you could remap the United States — not by geography, but rather social ties?
MIT’s SENSEable City Lab has done just that, by analyzing mobile-phone calling patterns across the country. By looking at calls between cellphones, they’ve revealed states and cities that are closely connected — and similarly, regions which aren’t nearly as closely connected as you’d think. Here’s their main result, color-coded by regional affiliation
(via Infographic Of The Day: Cellphone Calls Reveal The United States’s Invisible Ties | Co.Design)
(word to your mother, SENSEable City Lab!)
