Applications of the Household Living Budget Use Case to Develop Economic Insecurity Measures and Standards for the 21st Century Census Curated Data Enterprise with a Focus on Food Insecurity, Technical Report BI-2023-261

This report presents an application of the Curated Data Enterprise (CDE) (Keller et al., 2022) Demonstration Use Case on the household living budget (HLB) (Lancaster et al., 2023). The HLB is a yardstick that can be used to evaluate economic insecurity measures, construct new ones, and evaluate the adequacy of public assistance programs for low-income families. In this report we demonstrate how the HLB along with procedural data can be used to construct a food insecurity measure and assess the qualification thresholds of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The USDA Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement (CPS-FSS) food insecurity measure has monitored food insecurity over time at national and state levels since 1995. But if a food insecurity measure is to inform action and target interventions, it must be constructed for smaller geographic levels that take into account geographic price differences. The HLB is constructed at the census tract level and incorporates three key determinants of food insecurity: household size and composition, household income, and food costs. In this application of the HLB we construct a novel measure of food insecurity and evaluate the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) qualification thresholds for households in Washington, D.C. We bench mark our estimate of food insecurity against the 2022 food insecurity survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in the National Capital Region sponsored by the Capital Area Foodbank.

GitHub: https://github.com/uva-bi-sdad/food_insecurity

Montalvo C, Lancaster V, Salvo J, Shipp S. Applications of the Household Living Budget Use Case to Develop Economic Insecurity Measures and Standards for the 21st Century Census Curated Data Enterprise with a Focus on Food Insecurity (DRAFT), Technical Report BI-2023-261. Proceedings of the Biocomplexity Institute, University of Virginia; 2023 November. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18130/2kgx-tv50.