(e.g., financial crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, etc.), some of which rely on individual-specific scales (e.g., FAO 2020; United Nations 2020; World Bank 2020; Adjognon et al. 2021; Amare et al. 2021; etc.). However, given that both well-being and individual specific scales could be moving at the same time, it might be difficult to precisely interpret these types of empirical strategies.

Second, although many difficulties in interpreting subjective welfare metrics have been highlighted before, it is an empirical issue to understand how difficult such measures are to interpret. Previous results have found substantial differences between subjective and traditional welfare metrics (e.g., Beegle et al. 2012; etc.). However, rather than simply making it more difficult to detect changes in consumption and employment, these results demonstrate that subjective welfare metrics can possibly produce estimates that move in the _opposite_ direction of traditional metrics that are needed to target critical social protection programs during crises.<sup>4</sup> Although subjective welfare metrics can still be informative to policy decisions, these results demonstrate that such metrics cannot always be substitutes for traditional metrics of deprivations, and it is important to utilize subjective welfare indicators alongside more traditional welfare metrics during especially tumultuous times.<sup>5</sup> The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents a conceptual frame-

> 4This finding is also related to Headey (2012), which found in a cross-country comparison that subjective assessments of food security improved between 2005 and 2007/2008 using two simple subjective questions about food security from the Gallup World Poll. This time period was a time of both rapid income growth and rapid increases in food prices. However, unlike the case described here, subjective assessments of food security and more traditional metrics are aligned in Headey (2012), where higher food prices are associated with worse subjective assessments of food security in the data and larger income growth is associated with better subjective assessments. The overall result is driven by the large income growth outweighing any negative impact of price increases; and the results are dependent on the inclusion of China and India, where price controls limited the increases in food prices and income growth was substantial.

> 5The problem of changing scales is not only a problem of subjective welfare questions. For example, the Reduced Coping Strategy Index (rCSI) is based on a number of questions about whether households engaged in particular coping strategies, and the frequency they used such a strategy if one was used. Some questions have individual-specific scales, such as whether households relied on less expensive foods; and other questions have standardized scales, such as whether households borrowed money to purchase food. However, during the conflict in the Republic of Yemen, both types of questions have been affected and the interpretation of the questions has likely changed relative to less tumultuous settings. For example, there might not be less expensive food available given poorly functioning food markets and supply chains, or being able to borrow money might be interpreted as a positive development because it indicates that lending markets work. Because of these difficulties in interpretation, these questions in particular have diverged from other food security measures (e.g., WFP 2019; Tandon and Vishwanath 2020; Tandon and Vishwanath 2021).

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