and Shinyanga and two districts in the Kagera Region.<sup>4</sup> The districts were purposively selected to capture variations in socioeconomic characteristics. In each district, 24 communities were randomly chosen from the 2002 census based on probability-proportional-to-size criteria. Within communities, a random subvillage (enumeration area) was chosen, and all households therein were listed. Per subvillage, 24 households were randomly selected to participate, and three households were randomly assigned to each of the eight modules. Among the original households selected, there were 13 replacements because of refusals. Three households that started a diary were dropped because they did not complete their final interview. Another five households were dropped because of missing data on some of the key household characteristics, yielding a final sample size of 4,029 households.<sup>5</sup> The basic characteristics of the sampled households generally match those from the nationally representative national Household Budget Survey 2007. The randomized assignment of households to the eight different questionnaire variants was successful in terms of balance across various characteristics relevant for consumption and consumption measurement.<sup>6</sup> In regard to reporting error, there are several points to note about the survey experiment. The recall modules 1–5 ask the respondent about consumption, but not food acquisition. The questionnaires record details on meals consumed outside the home by household members as well as meals within the household that were shared with non–household members. The diaries are acquisition diaries that account for food given to animals (for example, scraps or leftovers), food used for seed, food taken from stocks, and food brought into the household by children (individual diary only). At the end of each week, there is a review of the main meals the household ate each day, and additional information is recorded if any components of these meals were not captured in the diaries. This is important because the 2012 State of Food Insecurity report incorporated, for the first time, tentative estimates of food losses, which led to a significant revision of some of the world hunger numbers (FAO, WFP, and IFAD 2012). Our diaries explicitly account for any food that has been used for seed, fed to animals, or thrown away. The recall modules do this implicitly by asking about the food consumed, which eliminates the counting of seeds and animal feed as consumption, but may not eliminate food scraps and leftovers that are fed to animals.

The survey was administered on paper. To minimize data entry errors, all questionnaires were entered twice, and discrepancies were adjudicated. Because nonstandard units are common in Tanzania, the experiment collected conversion factors during a community price survey conducted by the field supervisors in each sample community. Supervisors used a food weighing scale to obtain a metric value of food-specific nonstandard unit combinations. Median district-level metric conversion rates were used to convert nonmetric units into kilograms or liters. If district-level conversion rates were not available, the sample median was used. In a handful of cases where neither was available, measurements at the survey’s headquarters were taken after the fieldwork was done. Further details on the experiment implementation, including the relative costs to field each module, are described in Beegle et al. (2012).

> 4 The survey teams were small, extensively trained on all modules, and well supervised. They stayed in the field for the entire 12-month study period to ensure that well-trained survey teams consistently applied the modules across all districts and also to abstract away from seasonal concerns that might have interacted with specific survey designs. 5 There is almost no item nonresponse in the consumption section of the recall modules, that is, all respondents answered virtually all questions on all consumption items, including a response of no, or zero, consumption.

> 6 This analysis is presented in Beegle et al. (2012).

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