This paper marks the first effort to fill this information gap. The objective of the study was to test alternative approaches for the collection of FAFH with the ultimate goal of informing the identification of scalable best practices. To that end, we designed a survey experiment in urban Hanoi, Vietnam, in collaboration with the General Statistical Office. The performance of three different alternatives was tested against a ‘gold standard’ – a heavily supervised individual-level diary. The first arm was the status-quo in their current living standards survey (VHLSS), where one household member is asked to report total household FAFH consumption in only one line within the food consumption module. The design of the other two arms was informed by the survey methodology and behavioral sciences literatures and included not only the application of a separate (more detailed) module for the collection of FAFH but also followed different implementation protocols.

First, we tested the performance of an ‘individual-level recall’ arm, which asked every adult household member to report their own consumption of food away from home, under the rationale that each person is the best informant for their own consumption. Second, we tested a variant of a household-informant recall arm (‘bounding and salience’), with the objective of looking for an option that would still follow the most common field practice (i.e. interview one household informant) while minimizing the expected measurement error that comes from relying on the report of one person. More specifically, the distinctive elements introduced in this arm include: the implementation of the interview in two visits, with a 7-day period between visits; the administration of a 24-hour recall FAFH module in the first visit; and the handout of a simple worksheet. These changes were intended to: (a) reduce the information asymmetries associated with the fact that one person does not know everyone else’s consumption, (b) facilitate the tracking of consumption throughout the week, and (c) make the recall period more salient and therefore minimize the report of consumption that took place outside the reference period.

The main results of the study are (1) One line is not enough to collect accurate information on FAFH (it underestimates FAFH consumption by 33 percent); (2) individual recall is more reliable than the statusquo, but it also led to substantial underreporting (it underestimates FAFH consumption 22 percent); and (3) the bounding and salience arm dramatically improved the accuracy of the report to the point that made it statistically indistinguishable from the individual diary. Additionally, under-reporting of FAFH is not only relevant at the mean. While we are limited in the analysis we can do on poverty, we do find that the profile of households at the bottom of the distribution does change across survey arms. Moreover, while the consumption of FAFH grows with household income, the size of under-reporting as a percent of FAFH is higher among households with lower FAFH consumption.

In terms of implications for future surveys, two main take-aways can be drawn from the analysis: First, moving beyond one line should become a priority in countries where that is still the practice; second, there 33