Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-2021
Journal / Book Title
Public Health Nutrition
Abstract
Objective: To validate the telephone modality of the Latin American and Caribbean Food Security Scale (ELCSA) included in three waves of a phone survey to estimate the monthly household food insecurity prevalence during the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico. Design: We examined the reliability and internal validity of the ELCSA scale in three repeated waves of cross-sectional surveys with Rasch models. We estimated the monthly prevalence of food insecurity in the general population and in households with and without children and compared them with a national 2018 survey. We tested concurrent validity by testing associations of food insecurity with socio-economic status and anxiety. Setting: ENCOVID-19 is a monthly telephone cross-sectional survey collecting information on the well-being of Mexican households during the pandemic lockdown. Surveys used probabilistic samples, and we used data from April (n 833), May (n 850) and June 2020 (n 1674). Participants: Mexicans 18 years or older who had a mobile telephone. Results: ELCSA had an adequate model fit and food insecurity was associated, within each wave, with more poverty and anxiety. The COVID-19 lockdown was associated with an important reduction in food security, decreasing stepwise from 38·9 % in 2018 to 24·9 % in June 2020 in households with children. Conclusions: Telephone surveys were a feasible strategy to monitor reductions in food security during the COVID-19 lockdown.
DOI
10.1017/S1368980020004000
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Gaitán-Rossi, Pablo; Vilar-Compte, Mireya; Teruel, Graciela; and Pérez-Escamilla, Rafael, "Food insecurity measurement and prevalence estimates during the COVID-19 pandemic in a repeated cross-sectional survey in Mexico" (2021). Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works. 199.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/public-health-facpubs/199
Published Citation
Gaitán-Rossi, Pablo, Mireya Vilar-Compte, Graciela Teruel, and Rafael Pérez-Escamilla. "Food insecurity measurement and prevalence estimates during the COVID-19 pandemic in a repeated cross-sectional survey in Mexico." Public health nutrition 24, no. 3 (2021): 412-421.
Included in
Clinical Epidemiology Commons, Community Health and Preventive Medicine Commons, Dietetics and Clinical Nutrition Commons, Environmental Public Health Commons, Epidemiology Commons, Food Science Commons, Health and Medical Administration Commons, Health and Medical Physics Commons, Health Services Administration Commons, Health Services Research Commons, Influenza Virus Vaccines Commons, International Public Health Commons, Nutrition Commons, Other Public Health Commons, Patient Safety Commons, Public Health Education and Promotion Commons
Comments
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.