IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/jclass/v37y2020i3d10.1007_s00357-019-09344-2.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Are We Underestimating Food Insecurity? Partial Identification with a Bayesian 4-Parameter IRT Model

Author

Listed:
  • Christian A. Gregory

    (Economic Research Service)

Abstract

This paper addresses measurement error in food security in the USA. In particular, it uses a Bayesian 4-parameter IRT model to look at the likelihood of over- or under-reporting of the conditions that comprise the food security module (FSM), the data collection administered in many US surveys to assess and monitor food insecurity. While this model’s parameters are only partially identified, we learn about the likely values of these parameters by using a Bayesian framework. My results suggest significant under-reporting of more severe food security items, particularly those in the child module. I find no evidence of over-reporting of food hardships. I show that, under conservative assumptions, this model predicts food insecurity prevalence between 1 and 3 percentage points higher than current estimates, or roughly 4 to 15 percent of prevalence, for the years 2007–2015. Results suggest much larger increases—on the order of 50 percent of prevalence—for very low food security among households that were screened into the food security module.

Suggested Citation

  • Christian A. Gregory, 2020. "Are We Underestimating Food Insecurity? Partial Identification with a Bayesian 4-Parameter IRT Model," Journal of Classification, Springer;The Classification Society, vol. 37(3), pages 632-655, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:jclass:v:37:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1007_s00357-019-09344-2
    DOI: 10.1007/s00357-019-09344-2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00357-019-09344-2
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s00357-019-09344-2?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Steven Andrew Culpepper, 2016. "Revisiting the 4-Parameter Item Response Model: Bayesian Estimation and Application," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 81(4), pages 1142-1163, December.
    2. R. Bock & Murray Aitkin, 1981. "Marginal maximum likelihood estimation of item parameters: Application of an EM algorithm," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 46(4), pages 443-459, December.
    3. Gundersen, Craig & Kreider, Brent, 2009. "Bounding the effects of food insecurity on children's health outcomes," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 28(5), pages 971-983, September.
    4. Craig Gundersen & Brent Kreider, 2008. "Food Stamps and Food Insecurity: What Can Be Learned in the Presence of Nonclassical Measurement Error?," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 43(2), pages 352-382.
    5. Ernesto San Martín & Jean-Marie Rolin & Luis Castro, 2013. "Identification of the 1PL Model with Guessing Parameter: Parametric and Semi-parametric Results," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 78(2), pages 341-379, April.
    6. Nord, Mark, 2012. "Assessing Potential Technical Enhancements to the U.S. Household Food Security Measures," Technical Bulletins 142549, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
    7. A. Béguin & C. Glas, 2001. "MCMC estimation and some model-fit analysis of multidimensional IRT models," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 66(4), pages 541-561, December.
    8. Qi Long & Roderick J. A. Little & Xihong Lin, 2010. "Estimating causal effects in trials involving multitreatment arms subject to non‐compliance: a Bayesian framework," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 59(3), pages 513-531, May.
    9. Craig Gundersen & David Ribar, 2011. "Food Insecurity And Insufficiency At Low Levels Of Food Expenditures," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 57(4), pages 704-726, December.
    10. P. Richard Hahn & Jared S. Murray & Ioanna Manolopoulou, 2016. "A Bayesian Partial Identification Approach to Inferring the Prevalence of Accounting Misconduct," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 111(513), pages 14-26, March.
    11. Richard A. DePolt & Robert A. Moffitt & David C. Ribar, 2009. "Food Stamps, Temporary Assistance For Needy Families And Food Hardships In Three American Cities," Pacific Economic Review, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 14(4), pages 445-473, October.
    12. Coleman-Jensen, Alisha & Rabbitt, Matthew P. & Gregory, Christian A., 2017. "Examining an "Experimental" Food Security Status Classification Method for Households with Children," Technical Bulletins 264418, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
    13. Sheng, Yanyan, 2008. "Markov Chain Monte Carlo Estimation of Normal Ogive IRT Models in MATLAB," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 25(i08).
    14. Jean D. Opsomer & Helen H. Jensen & Sarah M. Nusser & Dorin Drignei & Yasuo Amemiya, 2002. "Statistical Considerations for the USDA Food Insecurity Index," Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications 02-wp307, Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University.
    15. Caroline Ratcliffe & Signe-Mary McKernan & Sisi Zhang, 2011. "How Much Does the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Reduce Food Insecurity?," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 93(4), pages 1082-1098.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rabbitt, Matthew P. & Hales, Laura J. & Burke, Michael P. & Coleman-Jensen, Alisha, 2023. "Household Food Security in the United States in 2022," Economic Research Report 338945, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
    2. Coleman-Jensen, Alisha & Rabbitt, Matthew & Gregory, Christian & Singh, Anita, 2022. "Household Food Security in the United States in 2021," Amber Waves:The Economics of Food, Farming, Natural Resources, and Rural America, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, vol. 2022(Economic ), September.
    3. Coleman-Jensen, Alisha & Rabbitt, Matthew & Gregory, Christian & Singh, Anita, 2022. "Household Food Security in the United States in 2021," Amber Waves:The Economics of Food, Farming, Natural Resources, and Rural America, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, vol. 2022(Economic ), September.
    4. Coleman-Jensen, Alisha & Rabbitt, Matthew P & Gregory, Christian A & Singh, Anita, 2021. "Household Food Security in the United States in 2020," Economic Research Report 327186, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gundersen, Craig & Kreider, Brent & Pepper, John, 2012. "The impact of the National School Lunch Program on child health: A nonparametric bounds analysis," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 166(1), pages 79-91.
    2. Noonan, Kelly & Corman, Hope & Reichman, Nancy E., 2016. "Effects of maternal depression on family food insecurity," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 22(C), pages 201-215.
    3. Otto Lenhart, 2021. "The effects of paid family leave on food insecurity—evidence from California," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 19(3), pages 615-639, September.
    4. Daniel Millimet & Manan Roy, 2015. "Partial identification of the long-run causal effect of food security on child health," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 48(1), pages 83-141, February.
    5. Andrea Sales S. De A. Melo, 2018. "The ?Bolsa-Família? Program And The Food Insecurity In Brazilian Household Between 2009 And 2013," Anais do XLIV Encontro Nacional de Economia [Proceedings of the 44th Brazilian Economics Meeting] 72, ANPEC - Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia [Brazilian Association of Graduate Programs in Economics].
    6. Bronchetti, Erin T. & Christensen, Garret & Hoynes, Hilary W., 2019. "Local food prices, SNAP purchasing power, and child health," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(C).
    7. Wilson, Norbert L. W. & Zheng, Yuqing & Burney, Shaheer & Kaiser, Harry M., 2016. "Do Grocery Food Sales Taxes Cause Food Insecurity?," 2016 Annual Meeting, July 31-August 2, Boston, Massachusetts 235324, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    8. Flores-Lagunes, Alfonso & Jales, Hugo B. & Liu, Judith & Wilson, Norbert L., 2023. "Moving Policies Toward Racial and Ethnic Equality: The Case of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program," GLO Discussion Paper Series 1272, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    9. Chanjin Zheng & Shaoyang Guo & Justin L Kern, 2021. "Fast Bayesian Estimation for the Four-Parameter Logistic Model (4PLM)," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(4), pages 21582440211, October.
    10. Kelly Noonan & Hope Corman & Nancy E. Reichman, 2014. "Effects of Maternal Depression on Family Food Insecurity," NBER Working Papers 20113, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Alfonso Flores‐Lagunes & Hugo B. Jales & Judith Liu & Norbert L. Wilson, 2024. "Moving policies toward racial and ethnic equality: The case of the supplemental nutrition assistance program," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 106(2), pages 573-594, March.
    12. Zheng, Yuqing & (Jason) Zhao, Jianqiang & Buck, Steven & Burney, Shaheer & Kaiser, Harry M. & Wilson, Norbert L., 2021. "Putting grocery food taxes on the table: Evidence for food security policy-makers," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 101(C).
    13. Nicholas Moellman, 2020. "Healthcare and Hunger: Effects of the ACA Medicaid Expansions on Food Insecurity in America," Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 42(2), pages 168-186, June.
    14. Aurino, Elisabetta & Fledderjohann, Jasmine & Vellakkal, Sukumar, 2019. "Inequalities in adolescent learning: Does the timing and persistence of food insecurity at home matter?," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 94-108.
    15. Gregory, Christian & Deb, Partha, 2016. "Who Benefits Most from SNAP?," 2016 Annual Meeting, July 31-August 2, Boston, Massachusetts 236648, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    16. Burney, Shaheer & Boehm, Rebecca & Lopez, Rigoberto, 2021. "The impact of the ACA Medicaid expansion on SNAP participation," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 101(C).
    17. Michael Edwards, 2010. "A Markov Chain Monte Carlo Approach to Confirmatory Item Factor Analysis," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 75(3), pages 474-497, September.
    18. Dharmasena, Senarath & Bessler, David A. & Capps, Oral, 2016. "Food environment in the United States as a complex economic system," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 163-175.
    19. repec:mpr:mprres:8084 is not listed on IDEAS
    20. Gregory Camilli & Jean-Paul Fox, 2015. "An Aggregate IRT Procedure for Exploratory Factor Analysis," Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, , vol. 40(4), pages 377-401, August.
    21. Irma Arteaga & Colleen Heflin & Leslie Hodges, 2018. "SNAP Benefits and Pregnancy-Related Emergency Room Visits," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 37(6), pages 1031-1052, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:jclass:v:37:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1007_s00357-019-09344-2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.