Responses to any of these individual items are not, in themselves, meaningful measures of food insufficiency, food insecurity, or hunger and should not be used in such a manner. One of the food security scales measures the full range of food insecurity and hunger on a 12-month basis. The other measures only the more severe conditions associated with reduced food intake and hunger over the past 30 days. Scale scores are continous ranging from 0 to 10. Households with scores at the lower end of the range are food secure.
Higher scores indicate more severe hunger and food insecurity conditions.
Further information on the estimation and interpretation of the scale scores can be found in Chapter 3 of the Summary Report and Chapters 2 and 3 of the Technical Report of the Food Security Measurement Project. In order to divide the population into food security status groups, FCS also created categorical variables.