Food Security (2023) 15:1383–1398

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-023-01388-y

ORIGINAL PAPER

Application of item response theory modelling to measure

an aggregate food security access score
Vonai Charamba1 · Lawrence N. Kazembe2 · Ndeyapo Nickanor3

Received: 15 February 2023 / Accepted: 24 July 2023 / Published online: 29 August 2023
© The Author(s) 2023

Abstract
Food security measurement is of paramount importance as it guides governance, policy formulation and intervention projects
targeting and monitoring and evaluation. The measurement of food insecurity has proven to be a difficult task owing to the
multi-dimensionality of the construct and different measurements have been developed to measure different dimensions of
food insecurity. However, it is difficult to apply the different measurements to a holistic food security measurement as their
classification might not agree. The current study proposes a composite food insecurity indicator by aggregating items from
Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS), Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) and Months of Inadequate
Household Food Provision (MIHFP) for Windhoek households’ data into a single measure using the Rasch Testlet Response
Model. The composite measure was internally validated against the HDDS, HFIAS and MIHFP and externally validated
against household income and the Lived Poverty Index (LPI) using Spearman's Rank Correlation and Cohen's Kappa. The
validation results suggest that the metric could be a promising measure of aggregate food insecurity worth further investiga-
tion and discussion. However, more research is needed in coming up with cut-points for categorizing households into food
insecurity statuses. In addition, the metric has only been computed and tested on a single urban sample in the Global South
and hence it is not generalizable to different setups. Other researchers who might want to use the index can try to estimate
and validate the index in different scenarios and suggest ways the index can be improved.

Keywords Aggregate food insecurity measurement · Food access · HFIAS · HDDS · IRT Testlet model · MIHFP

1 Introduction To be successful, targeting systems and policy formulation

Poverty reduction, food insecurity and undernutrition remain
high on the development agenda (HLPE, 2017; Leroy et al.,
2015) while targeting initiatives continue to be an important
concern and have become more relevant in this era of climate
change hazards, ever-shrinking economies and aid budgets.
* Vonai Charamba
vcharamba@unam.na; charambavonai@gmail.com
Lawrence N. Kazembe
lkazembe@unam.na
Ndeyapo Nickanor
nnickanor@unam.na
1
Department of Animal Production, Agribusiness
and Economics, University of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia
2
Department of Computing, Mathematical and Statistical
Sciences, University of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia
3
Faculty of Agriculture, Engineering and Natural Sciences,
University of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia
must use indicators that are valid and reliable in identify-
ing at-risk beneficiaries, progress monitoring and evalua-
tion and remain straightforward, simple and inexpensive to
use (Chung, 1997). Historically, food availability (United
Nations, 1975) has been the main aspect of food security
measurement (Bertelli, 2020; Haysom & Tawodzera, 2018).
However, the conceptualization of food security has devel-
oped significantly to incorporate the elements of individual
access to food, implying that food can be inadequate/inac-
cessible despite it being readily available in markets (Webb
et al., 2006). The construct was re-defined at the World Food
Summit of 1996 as “a situation that exists when all people at
all times have physical, social and economic access to suf-
ficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs
and preferences for an active healthy life” (FAO, 1996). In
short, food security is measured as a household-level concept
that refers to uncertain, insufficient or unacceptable avail-
ability, access or utilization of food (Wunderlich & Norwood,
2006). FAO (1996) defined four pillars of food security; (1)

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food availability (2) food access (3) food utilization and
(4) food stability. However, this multidimensionality of the
attributes has posed challenges in its measurement.
Food security measurement is of paramount importance
as it allows comparisons between individuals, households
and groups. It guides governance (Coates, 2013), policy
formulations, project interventions and safety-net
programmes targeting, (Chung, 1997) and highlights changes
and progress towards achieving set targets as measurement
drives diagnosis and response (Barrett, 2010). Given the top
prioritization of food security by many governments and
global development communities and its conceptualization as
a challenge (McCordic et al., 2022), there is a need to improve
the understanding of food security measurement (Leroy et al.,
2015, Bartelli, 2020; Jones et al., 2013; Deitchler et al.,
2010). However, there is a rigorous international debate on
how best to quantify levels of food insecurity (Coates, 2013;
Haysom & Tawodzera, 2018; Headey et al., 2013; Leroy
et al., 2015). Methodological concerns in the measurement
of food insecurity have been highlighted (Abuelhaj, 2007;
Haysom & Tawodzera, 2018), and the measurement of
the trait has proven to be a difficult task, owing to it being
multidimensional (Barrett, 2010), resulting in different
measures of food insecurity used interchangeably and at
times classification by different indices is not in agreement.
As a result, analysts have resorted to measuring the distinct
facets of food security rather than holistically measuring the
attribute. However, measurement tools designed to measure
certain contexts can overlook important parameters in a
different context.
Several measures have been developed to measure house-
hold food access and these include; the Household Food
Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS), the Household Dietary
Diversity Score (HDDS) and Months of Inadequate House-
hold Food Provisioning (MIHFP) developed and utilized
by the United States Agency for International Development
(USAID) Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance (FANTA)
Project. The HFIAS is a nine-item experience-based scale
to measure the prevalence and severity of household food
insecurity in developing countries (Abuelhaj, 2007; ENN,
2007), based on universal experiences; anxieties and uncer-
tainties households may have faced with limited access to
food. The nine HFIAS questionnaire items, arranged in order
of the levels of severity of food insecurity they measure have
response codes 1 “never” if the household has not experi-
enced the condition in the past month, 2 “rarely” for a house-
hold that experienced the condition less than three times, 3
“sometimes” for a household that had between three and 10
experiences and 4 “often” for a household with more than
10 experiences of the condition. The scale, ranging between
0 and 27, is a summation of the responses for a particular
household. The HDDS is a proxy for the quality and quantity
of food (Abuelhaj, 2007; Leroy et al., 2015), aimed to assess
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V. Charamba et al.
the variety of the diet by adding up the number of food
groups eaten by household members or individuals in the
last 24 h before data collection. The MIHFP is a food secu-
rity measure based on the total months in which households
had inadequate food provision (Bilinsky & Swindale, 2010).
The survey items for measuring the HFIAS, the HDDS and
the MIHFP ate shown in Table 1.
In addition to coming up with an HFIAS score by adding
up housing responses to the nine items in the scale, the score
can be further categorized into the Household Food Insecurity
Access Prevalence (HFIAP) with four food insecurity classes
1) Food Secure 2) Mildly Food Secure 3) Moderately Food
Insecure and 4) Severely Food Insecure. There is no stand-
ard method for categorizing the HDDS and MIHFP into food
insecurity classes. However, some scholars have attempted to
categorize the HDDS and MIHFP as shown in Table 2.
Although the HFIAS, the HDDS and the MIHFP are
intended to measure the same dimension: food access, they
might not be congruent in classifying households hence it
might be challenging to incorporate all three measures dur-
ing safety-net targeting or progress monitoring and evalua-
tion and policy formulation. It is argued that the HFIAS does
not capture important elements of household food security,
dietary diversity and coping strategies (Coates et al., 2006;
Kirkland et al., 2013) and thus should be used in conjunction
with other primary indicators of dietary diversity and coping
strategies (Kirkland et al., 2013), to adequately locate vul-
nerable households across geographical and cultural settings.
Similarly, the National Research Council (2005) criticized
the use of a similar scale, the Household Food Security Sur-
vey Module (HFSSM) used in the Current Population Sur-
vey, highlighting that it does not capture much information
relevant to capture frequency and duration of food insecurity
levels. In addition, these measures were originally designed
for measurement in rural settings and might not be compat-
ible with measurement in urban areas where households do
not directly rely on agriculture and it might be difficult to
detect months of instability, diets might be influenced more
by ethnicity than food security status, coupled with lack of
safety-net interventions. Haysom and Tawodzera (2018)
urged a renewed focus on building food security metrics that
apply to the unique characteristics of urban food systems. An
international workshop on simple tools for measuring house-
hold food access and dietary diversity was held in Nairobi,
2007 and one of the objectives was to explore how tools can
be applied and “integrated” to improve the food security
information systems (ENN, 2007).
This study attempted to come up with a single measure
of household food access levels based on the responses to
items for measuring all three scales by considering the sec-
tions as subtests, defined by Wang and Wilson (2005) as
testlets, within one test intended to measure the food access
dimension. The three measures were selected for this study
 Table 1  Survey questions for the HFIAS < HDDS and MIHFP used in the households’ survey
HFIAS Items HDDS Items MIHFP

I would like to start off by reading some statements that people Now I would like to ask you about the types of foods that
have made about their household’s food consumption over
the past four weeks. For each statement, I would like you to
tell me whether this happened rarely, sometimes, often or
never in the past four weeks.
Interviewer: hand show card to the respondent (READ list
and circle only ONE answer for each question)
1. …, did you worry that your household would not have
enough food?
2.… were you or any household member not able to eat the
kinds of foods you preferred because of a lack of resources
(money)?
3.…did you or any household member have to eat a limited
you or anyone else in your household ate yesterday. By
yesterday we are referring to foods that were eaten during
the day and/or at night.
(Read the list of foods. Circle YES in the box if anyone in the
household ate the food in question, and circle NO if no one
in the household ate the food)
1. Any pasta, bread, rice noodles, biscuits or foods made from
flour, millet, sorghum, maize, rice, wheat, or oats
2. Any potatoes, sweet potatoes, beetroots, carrots or any other
foods made from them
3. Any other vegetables
In the past 12 months, were there months in which you did not
have enough food to meet your household’s needs?
Circle the months in which the household did not have
enough food to meet the needs
1. January
2. February
3. March
Application of Item response theory modelling to measure an aggregate

variety of foods due to a lack of resources (money)?

4…did you or any household member have to eat some foods 4. Any fruits 4. April
that you really did not want to eat because of a lack of
resources (money) to obtain other types of food?
5…did you or any household member have to eat a smaller 5. Any beef, pork, lamb, goat, rabbit, wild game, chicken, 5. May
meal than you felt you needed because there was not enough duck, other birds, chicken heads and feet, liver, kidney, heart,
food? or other organ meats/offal or products
6…, did you or any household member have to eat fewer meals 6. Eggs 6. June
in a day because there was not enough food?
7…was there ever no food to eat of any kind in your household 7. Any fresh fish, dried fish or shellfish 7. July
because of a lack of resources (money) to get food?
8…. did you or any household member go to sleep at night 8. Any foods made from beans, peas, lentils, or nuts 8. August
hungry because there was not enough food?
9…. did you or any household member go a whole day and 9. Any cheese, yoghurt, milk or other milk/dairy products 9. September
night without eating anything because there was not enough
food?
10. Any foods made with oil, fat, or butter 10. October
11. Any sugar or honey 11. November
12. Any other foods, such as condiments, coffee, tea 12. December

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Table 2  Calculation and classification of households by individual indicators
Food security indicator Calculation guidelines Classification guidelines References

Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS)
Household Food Insecurity Access Prevalence (HFIAP) tions and experiences that represent generally increasing
Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS)
Months of Adequate Food Provision (MAHFP)
Respondents are asked a set of 9 questions, eliciting percep- HFIAS See Coates et al. (2007) for compu-
For the HFIAS, the responses are tation guidelines
levels of food insecurity, with a recall period of 4 weeks. summed to give a score from
In the case of affirmation response, the frequency of 0–27
occurrence is coded as 1 (rarely- once or twice), 2 some- HFIAP
times (3–10 times) and 3 often (> 10 times) 1 = Food Secure
2 = Mildly Food Insecure
3 = Moderately Food Insecure
4 = Severely Food Insecure
Respondents are asked a series of questions as to whether 0–3 Low Swindale and Bilinsky (2006)
any of the household members consumed the food groups 4–5 Medium
in the past 24 h. Cereals; roots and tubers; vegetables;
6–12 High
fruits; meat poultry and offal; eggs; fish and seafood;
pulses, legumes and nuts; milk and milk products; oil 0–3 Low Huluka and Wondimagegnhu (2019)
and fats; sugar and honey; miscellaneous. The responses 4–6 Medium
should be either “0” or “1.” Summing all the food groups 7–12 High
provides a household dietary diversity score ranging from
0 to 12.
Respondents are asked to indicate the months that they 10–12 Food Secure Bilinsky and Swindale (2010)
encountered inadequate household food supply. Twelve 0–9 Food Insecure
months minus the total number of months during which a
10–12 Very high Mutea et al. (2019)
household was unable to meet its food needs.
7–9 High
4–6 Medium
0–3 Low
V. Charamba et al.
Application of Item response theory modelling to measure an aggregate
because (1) they are normally collected in one questionnaire
by institutions that adopt the FANTA measurement scales
for food (in)security measurement and thus were readily
available in the secondary data that was available for analy-
sis (2) the proposed metric incorporates the (chronic) dura-
tion of food insecurity (MIHFP) and acute food insecurity
through incorporation of the HFIAS and HDDS which cap-
ture access to dietary variety and perceptions about insuf-
ficient food quality and quantity into one measure. Although
the proposed model might violate the comprehensibility-
simplicity trade-off, that is, as much as it might portray the
food insecurity phenomenon, it might be too complicated, it
is computed from household instead of individual-level data,
which requires less time and fewer resources to collect than
individual-level data (Jones et al., 2013). In addition, the
data is usually collected in the same survey. The household
level metric is appropriate for targeting food aid, screening
at-risk households and monitoring changes in food security
over time.
1.1 The testlet item response models
Item response theory (IRT) models, are generalized linear
mixed effects models (Johnson, 2004) and are a special case
of latent variable models (Wunderlich & Norwood, 2006),
concerned with the measurement of inherently unobserv-
able attributes such as food insecurity. They are stochastic
mathematical models represented as item response function
(IRF), which relates the respondent probability of observ-
ing a particular response to a categorically scored manifest
variable (questionnaire item) to individual proficiency (𝜃 ),
assumed to have a 0 mean Gaussian distribution, giving
the position of the respondent on the latent construct being
measured (in this case food insecurity) and item discriminant
parameter (a) and difficulty parameter (b). The latent vari-
able is regarded as fixed for a given respondent (household)
and values for the item responses for that household are
regarded as independent and represent different aspects of
food security. The connection between 𝜃 and X ’s is assumed
probabilistic so that households with different proficiency
(food insecurity) levels can still have different values for the
observed X values. The parameter a indicates how much the
measurement error changes theta (𝜃) and large values result
in low measurement error and the stronger the relationship
between theta (𝜃) and the questionnaire item.
Standard IRT models such as the Rasch model, the two-
parameter logistic (2PL) model, and the Generalized Partial
Credit Model (GPCM) for polytomous responses assume
that the latent variable (𝜃) being measured is unidimensional
and one person’s responses to different items are independ-
ent (local item independence) and responses of different
persons to the same item are independent (local person
independence). In addition, IRT models assume that the
1387
probability of endorsing a response option is monotonically
non-decreasing, that is, respondents with higher levels of
the latent continuum have higher chances of endorsing more
severe items and item categories.
1.2 Application of IRT in food security
access measurement
The application of IRT modelling to food security measure-
ment is not new. The World Food Programme (WFP) Voice
of the Hungry (VoH) uses the Rach IRT model for estimat-
ing the Food Insecurity Experience Scale. Nord (2014) illus-
trated the use of the one-parameter logistic (Rasch) model in
food security modelling. The United States Department of
Agriculture (USDA) uses the Rasch IRT model to measure
household food security for originally polytomous responses
dichotomized before estimation (Wunderlich & Norwood,
2006). A panel of experts reviewed the use of the Rasch
model food insecurity measurement for dichotomous, origi-
nally polytomous responses and suggested the modification
of the IRT model to handle the polytomous nature of the
data collected. Johnson (2004) illustrated the applicability of
IRT models in food security measurement, explaining vari-
ous estimation methods, the appropriateness of IRT models
on food security measures and the determination of cut-off
points for the classification of individuals into food insecu-
rity categories. He concluded that the assumptions need to
be met before the model can be used for inference and there
is a need to validate if the propensity measured by the IRT
model is related to the true food security score. Some schol-
ars have applied the Rasch model to validate the Household
Dietary Diversity Score (Vellema et al., 2016; Charamba
et al., 2019) while some scholars applied the polytomous
IRT models to validate the HFIAS (Charamba et al., 2019;
Deitchler et al., 2010; Bertelli, 2020). IRT methods have
an advantage in that they provide mechanisms to evaluate
the contribution of an individual item to the latent measure
being estimated, by assessing the item parameter estimates
and item fit statistics (see Charamba et al., 2019) thus it is
not necessary to perform sensitivity analysis to assess indi-
vidual item contribution in the model.
1.3 The rationale for an aggregate food security
access measure
Some scholars suggested disaggregated suites of indicators
to capture the complexity and diversity of the food insecu-
rity construct (Coates, 2013). However, the use of different
measures to quantify the food access dimension makes it
difficult to compare results from different studies within
the same spatial and temporal domains as different meas-
ures yield different estimates of food insecurity (Haysom
& Tawodzera, 2018) and different metrics may classify
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1388
the same household differently. For example, Mutea et al.
(2019) noted that the HDDS and the Food Consumption
Scale (FCS) revealed less food insecurity than the MAHFP,
Coping Strategy Index (CSI) and HFIAS. This might pose
a challenge in household food insecurity classification for
reporting, beneficiary targeting in programme intervention
and policy formulation, especially since food security has
been conceptualized as a development challenge (HLPE,
2017; Leroy et al., 2015; McCordic et al., 2022). As a result,
there is a pressing need to develop decision-support mecha-
nisms to support food security policy and research (Mock
et al., 2013) and interventions. Several authors have sug-
gested a re-think of food security measurement (e.g. Headey
& Ecker, 2013) with arguments that existing measures are
too varied. Maxwell et al. (2013), considered the possibility
of combining food security metrics or using them in a com-
plementary way to yield a more multidimensional picture
of household food insecurity, arguing that the “holy grail”
of food security measurement would be a single measure
that is valid, reliable and comparable over time and space,
capturing different elements of insecurity. However, no sin-
gle measure meets these criteria (Coates & Maxwell, 2012).
McCordic et al. (2022) combined the HDDS, HFIAS and
MAHFP into a new index by using an adjusted geometric
mean and observed a correlation between food insecurity
and inconsistent resource access. They reiterated that how
scores are aggregated can significantly affect the index sta-
bility and such an index should provide means for normali-
zation that ensures equal priority of measures being aggre-
gated. It is behind this background that the current study
proposed an alternative aggregate food access measure by
combining the HFIAS, HDDS and MIHFP using the IRT
modelling technique. These indicators selected were selected
because they have a low-respondent burden (Leroy et al.,
2015) and are suitable for large surveys as they exclude
questions on household income and expenditure, consumed
quantities, as well as quantities produced and distance to
markets which might be difficult to obtain. In addition, they
are usually combined in one survey by many institutions
measuring food insecurity based on the FANTA metrics.
1.4 The goodness of fit tests and construct validity
To be useful, food security indicators should be valid, well-
constructed, reliable, accurate and suitable for providing
analytical measurement for a given purpose (Johnson, 2004;
Leroy et al., 2015). An important step in the validation of
food security measures is to assess the extent to which the
data are consistent with the assumption of the measurement
model (Nord, 2014; Bertelli, 2020; Deitchler et al., 2010;
Johnson, 2004). Charamba et al. (2019) conducted a validity
study on the applicability of the HDDS and HFIAS scales in
measuring Windhoek urban households' (current data) food
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V. Charamba et al.
insecurity levels. The Rasch IRT model and the area under
the curve (AUC) and the receiver operator curve (ROC)
were applied to validate the HDDS with binary items while
the Partial Credit Model (PCM) validated the polytomous
item response HFIAS. The Principal Components Analysis
(PCA) and the Mokken analysis were used to determine the
dimensionality and monotonicity, that is, an increasing trend
of item severity is preferred, so that items and item response
categories are arranged in such a way that a household with
a higher food insecurity levels has a higher probability of
endorsing higher-order items or item categories. Their study
concluded that the HFIAS is unidimensional and items are
monotonic, with Loevinger coefficients > 0.5 implying that
they are monotonically arranged (see Charamba et al., 2019).
However, all items in the HDDS had Loevinger coefficients
< 0.3, implying that they are not Guttman items, that is,
they are not monotonically arranged according to the level
of food insecurity levels they measure. In addition, items 2
and 5 of the HFIAS were not monotonically placed among
other items. The results from the ROC curve showed that
the HDDS is effective in separating Windhoek households
according to their dietary quality and quantity. Vellema et al.
(2016) validated the HDDS and HFIAS against household
income and the Progress out of Poverty Index among other
variables and Nickanor et al. (2017) compared household
food security levels across households' socio-economic char-
acteristics and observed a relationship between food inse-
curity and household type and location, and LPI, with food
insecurity levels increasing with poverty levels. McCordic
et al. (2022) observed a negative correlation between incon-
sistent access to water, electricity, cooking fuel and cash
income, with different correlation magnitudes observed
across cities in the Global South. The contribution of the
current study to food security measurement literature is that
it is probably the first initiative to try and bring together the
experience-based coping strategy and dietary diversity indi-
cators into one measure of food security using IRT methods.
2 Material and methods
2.1 Research objectives
The objectives of the study are to:
1. Create an aggregate metric for assessing food access, uti-
lization and stability by aggregating the HDDS, HFIAS
and MAHFP score items using the Rasch testlet item
response theory model.
2. Internally and externally validate the proposed metric
against the indices whose items were aggregated and against
common determinants and consequences of food insecurity.
Application of Item response theory modelling to measure an aggregate 1389

To address the stated objectives, the investigation first
created an aggregate index for Windhoek households’ food
access, utilization and stability by aggregating the HDDS,
MIHFP and HFIAS items using the testlet item response
model and validated the model against the Lived Poverty
Index (LPI) and household income levels. In addition,
the metric was correlated against the HDDS, HFIAP and
MIHFP categories (Mutea et al., 2019; Bilinsky & Swindale,
2010) to assess the individual contribution of the HDDS,
HFIAS and MIHFP to the new measure.
2.2 The data
gives details on the distribution of PSUs, households and
population per constituency. The second stage involved
the systematic selection of 25 households from each of the
35 PSUs. The data on several demographic characteristics
and socio-economic attributes including housing, income
levels, access to water, cooking energy, electricity, access
to medical facilities and food access and consumption pat-
terns were collected from household heads or their proxies
using the AFSUN-HCP Household Food Security Baseline
Survey questionnaire. Food access and consumption data
collected include the HFIAS, HDDS and MIHFP. The data
was collected using the tablet method.

The current study is based on secondary data analysis for

data collected through a face-to-face survey in Windhoek,
the capital city of Namibia. The data was collected from
urban households under a study funded by the Open Soci-
ety Foundation for South Africa, conducted by the Depart-
ment of Statistics and Population Studies of the University
of Namibia (UNAM) in partnership with the African Food
Security Urban Network (AFSUN), the Hungry Cities
Partnership (HCP) and Balsillie School of International
Affairs, aimed at assessing food security status for urban
households in the Global South. A total of 875 house-
holds were selected through a two-stage random sampling
procedure. The first stage involved the random selection
of 35 Primary Sampling Units (PSU) demarcated for the
2011 Population and Housing Census (Namibia Statistics
Agency, 2013), using the probability proportional to size
(PPS) from all the 10 Windhoek constituencies, where the
number of PSUs selected per constituency was by the num-
ber of PSUs, number of households and population in the
constituency. Only one PSU was selected from Windhoek
Rural constituency due to its proximity to Windhoek urban
as the original study was mainly concerned with the meas-
urement of food security of urban households. Table 3
2.3 Estimation of the aggregate food access index
A testlet is a bundle of items that share a common “stimulus”
(Wang & Wilson, 2005), that is, items that are related to a
common sub-component of the latent variable being meas-
ured. Testlet models were developed to handle tests where
items can be grouped into subtests measuring a sub-category
of the stimuli being measured, as items in one subtest may
be related, probably violating the local item independence
assumption as there is a possibility that items in a subtest are
related. They include random parameters added to handle the
dependence that exists among items within the same bundle.
The Rasch Testlet Model (Wang & Wilson, 2005) is a model
for both dichotomous and polytomous items. Suppose X is the
manifest variable that codes the response of a food security
question as k, k = 1 … K, then the model used in the current
study, generalized to allow items to have variant discrimination
abilities and adjusted to cater for polytomous items has an IRF
which relates the probability of endorsing a specific response
category given a specific proficiency level as in Eq. (1).

Table 3  Household survey sample selection

Constituency No. of PSUs Sampled No. of HH Sampled HH Population in Population in Population in
PSUs constituency sampled PSUs sampled HH

John Pandeni 63 2 3377 50 15121 559 130

Katutura Central 57 2 5096 50 24608 726 151
Katutura East 48 2 3756 50 18501 733 149
Khomasdal 136 3 10471 75 43,921 1128 247
Moses //Garoeb 158 6 13804 150 45564 1648 543
Samora Machel 195 5 13250 125 50110 1682 457
Tobias Hainyeko 155 5 12428 125 45912 1231 372
Windhoek East 101 3 7089 75 22712 617 254
Windhoek West 158 6 13837 150 53438 1814 520
Windhoek Rural 109 1 6330 25 22254 104 78
Total 1180 35 89438 875 342141 10424 2901

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( )
exp[ai 𝜃j − bik + 𝛾jd(i) ]
Pjik (Xi = k∕𝜃) = ( )
1 + exp[ai 𝜃j − bik + 𝛾jd(i) ]
where Pjik represents the probability of person j with ability
𝜃j getting a score k on item i in a testlet d with step difficulty
bik , 𝜃j is the food insecurity level for household j and ai is
the discrimination parameter for item i . 𝛾jd(i) is the effect
of item i in testlet d on respondent j . The model exhibits a
monotonic non-decreasing relationship between the latent
variable and the probability of affirming an item response
category. As 𝜃 increases, the probability of affirming or
endorsing a response category increases. As bik increases,
the item category becomes “harder” and the probability of a
person affirming a response category decreases for a house-
hold with a specific value of 𝜃 . The discriminant parameter
a must be at least 0 and indicates the strength of the connec-
tion between the latent variable 𝜃 and the manifest question-
naire item Xi . When a is near 0, the connection is weak and
when a is 0, then there is no connection. When a is positive
and large, the item is highly discriminating and there is a
strong connection between the item and the latent measure
(food insecurity) implying less measurement error, and a
high ability to disaggregate households according to their
food insecurity classes. The model parameters and hyper-
parameters have the following prior distributions:
( )
𝜃 ∼ N(0,1); a ∼ LN(0.2,0.2); b ∼ N(0,1); 𝛾 ∼ 0, 𝜎𝛾2 ; 𝜎𝛾2 ∼ IG(1,1).
where N, LN and IG denote the Normal, Lognormal and
Inverse Gamma distributions respectively. The Lognormal
distribution was selected for the discriminant parameter ( a)
to obtain non-negative values near 1 and to make the item-
characteristic curve monotonically non-decreasing. The test-
let model was chosen for the current study ahead of standard
IRT for polytomous data based on the assumption that there
is a possibility of correlation that might exist for items in the
same testlet (HFIAS, HDDS and MIHFP). All 9 items of the
HFIAS scale (testlet 1), all 12 items of the HDDS (testlet 2)
and all the 12 items of the MAHFP (testlet 3) were used in
the current testlet model. The local item independence was
not tested for the current model, however, the magnitude of
the testlet variance of at least 0.25 imply significant testlet
effects (Wang & Wilson, 2005).
The model parameters were estimated using the Bayes-
ian estimation with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)
using the Gibbs Sampling methods in WinBUGS 1.4.3
(Lunn et al., 2000). Convergence was checked by visualiz-
ing the trace and history plots of the four chains that were
initialized with different starting values as well as when
the Brook-Gelman-Rubin (BGR, Gelman et al., 1995)
statistics becomes close to 1. The category characteris-
tic curves (CCC) were assessed to check if the combined
function is monotonically non-decreasing.
13
V. Charamba et al.
2.4 Categorization of the IRT food security measure
(1)
The categorization of households into food security levels
similar to one of the expert judgement methods proposed by
Johnson (2004) to categorize households under the HFSSM
into food secure, mildly food insecure, moderately food inse-
cure and severely food insecure categories were adopted in
the current study. The method used assumed that a house-
hold belonging to a particular food insecurity class has a fixed
minimum probability of affirming a specific questionnaire
item. For example, experts may want to find a cut-point 𝜏2 so
that Pr(Xi7 = 1|hunger) = 0.95 or (some large probability)
where item 7 is the item that asks the individual if they were
ever hungry but could not( eat) over the past year, and then
solve for the equation Pr7 𝜏2 = 0.95. In the current study,
the specific items demarcating households according to food
security categories were determined according to Coates
et al.'s (2007) categorization of households in HFIAP classes.
The current procedure is based on the existence of a measure
Yk , k = 1, 2, 3, 4 denoting the realization that a household is
food secure, mildly food insecure, moderately food insecure
and severely food insecure respectively. A perfect monotone
relationship is assumed between the food insecurity category
and the propensity 𝜃 measured from the IRT model such that
there exists cut-points 𝜏1, 𝜏2, and 𝜏3 such that:
⎧1 if 𝜃 ≤ 𝜏1
⎪2 if 𝜏1 < 𝜃 ≤ 𝜏2
Yk = ⎨
⎪3 if 𝜏2 < 𝜃 ≤ 𝜏3
⎩4 if 𝜃 > 𝜏3
and these points were used to categorize households into
four food security categories. The relationship between Yk
and 𝜃 is assumed to be probabilistic, where 𝜃 depends on the
food security category Yk of household k . Let F(𝜃∕Y = y)
denote the distribution of the propensity given the household
food security status Y = y , the distributions are assumed to
be stochastically ordered such that:
F(t∕Y = 1) ≤ F(t∕Y = 2) ≤ F(t∕Y = 3) ≤ F(t∕Y = 4)
For all values t . The propensities are assumed to be nor-
mally distributed within each food security category with
means 𝜇1 ≤ 𝜇2 ≤ 𝜇2 ≤ 𝜇4 and 𝜎1 = 𝜎2 = 𝜎3 = 𝜎4 .
According to the computation of the Household Food
Insecurity Access Prevalence (HFIAP) categories (Coates
et al., 2007), a household that responded with a 1 (never)
or 2 (rarely) for item 1 of the HFIAS is assumed to be food
secure, while households responding the item with 3 (some-
times) and 4 (often) are considered food insecure. This can
be mathematically written as:
( )
𝑃 𝑟 food secure∕X1 ≤ 2 = 1 (2)
and implicitly
Application of Item response theory modelling to measure an aggregate
( )
𝑃 𝑟 food secure∕X1 > 2 = 0
However, Eq. (2) implies that all items are Guttman items
and all severely food insecure households have infinitely
large propensities. However, the assumption was relaxed
based on the findings from the study by Charamba et al.
(2019) where items 2 and 5 of the HFIAS scale were not
monotonically placed among other items of the scale and all
HDDS items were not Guttman-items, as the measure was
not designed to depict monotonicity as the food groups in
the testlet are not weighted. It was assumed that households
in each category have a probability of ascertaining a certain
discriminatory item with a probability of 0.7 (expert judge-
ment). As a result, a response of 3 (sometimes) to item 1
“Worry that the household would not have enough food”, a
response of 3 to item 3 “Eat a limited variety of foods” and
a response of 3 to item 6 “Eat fewer meals in a day” were
set as
( boundaries
) to (calculate
) the cut-off(points
) such that
Pr13 𝜏1 = 0.7, Pr33 𝜏2 = 0.7, and Pr63 𝜏1 = 0.7, were
used for determination of 𝜏1, 𝜏2 an 𝜏3.
2.5 Internal and external validation
of the composite IRT food insecurity measure
The IRT food insecurity measure was checked for internal
index consistency by assessing the strength of the associa-
tion with the subscales that were combined to make up the
aggregate measure, i.e., the HFIAS, the HDDS, and the
MIHFP using the Pearson’s Correlation coefficient (fol-
lowing McCordic et al., 2022). A negative correlation will
mean that an increase in the subscale results in a decrease
in the aggregate index while a low correlation will mean
that the subscale did not play a major contribution (lower
discrimination ability). The HFIAP was computed accord-
ing to Coates et al. (2007). As there is no standard way of
categorizing the HDDS and MIHFP, the categorization for
the HDDS in the current study was tailor-made for the cur-
rent study following Oldewage-Theron and Kruder (2008),
Swindale and Bilinsky (2006) and Huluka and Wondimageg-
nhu (2019) and 1–3 food groups were categorized as low,
4–6 groups as medium, 7–9 as high and 10–12 very high
dietary quality. The months of inadequate household food
supply were categorized by reversing Mutea et al. (2019)
categories for the MIHFP categories where households that
had inadequate supply for 9–12 months were considered to
be severely food insecure, 6–8 months as moderately food
insecure, 3–5 as mildly food insecure and households that
experienced food shortages for 0–2 months as food secure.
For external validation, the IRT aggregate metric was
correlated with the household income and Lived Poverty
Index (LPI). As the surveyed households are urban holds,
they purchase most of their food items for consumption, thus
household income is a determinant of food insecurity. As a
1391
result, there is an expected relationship between urban food
access and household income. The LPI is a barometer of
quality of life that measures the subjective experience of pov-
erty (Mattes et al., 2016) and is an indication of how often a
household goes without basic commodities, including food,
implying that a household that lacks basic commodities (food
included) is likely to be food insecure, making LPI a deter-
minant and consequence of food insecurity. As a result, the
new IRT index was externally validated against the house-
hold income and LPI which captures most of the variables
McCordic et al. (2022) validated their index against.
Income quartiles were computed by first ranking the
households from poorest to wealthiest based on household
income, and then grouping them into four income quartiles
and assigning 1 to the wealthiest and 4 to the poorest so that
each quartile had approximately 25% of the population. LPI
was computed on a 5-point (0, absence of poverty -4, constant
absence of basic necessities) and then categorized into 4 classes
according to the quartiles (< 1, 1–2, 2–3, 3–4) and these were
considered to have a one-to-one correspondence with the food
security classes. The agreement between the household food
insecurity levels measured by the Testlet model and other meas-
urement methods was assessed using Spearman’s rank correla-
tion coefficient (r) and Cohen's Kappa (𝜅) agreement.
3 Results
From the category characteristic curve (CCC) in Fig. 1, the
probability of endorsing an item ategory for the combined
testlet data is monotonically non-decreasing. For example,
households with lower ability parameters (food insecurity
level) are more likely to endorse the first category (never) in
the HFIAS testlet and “no” in the HDDS and MIHFP testlets
and less likely to endorse category 4 (often). On the other
hand, households high up on the food insecurity continuum
are more likely to endorse category 4. However, category 2
is less likely to be endorsed by households across all food
security classes as its distribution is flatter.
Figure 2 shows the graphical presentation of the ability
(IRT food insecurity) estimates for all the households in the
study. The abilities seem to fluctuate between ±3 across all
households, and there is no obvious pattern in the distribu-
tion of food insecurity levels according to the household
observation order.
Figure 3 gives the distribution of the difficulty param-
eter estimates across items. The first 9 items are from the
HFIAS scale, items 10 to 21 are from the HDDS section
while items 22 to 33 are from the MIHFP scale. Items in
the HFIAS testlet are relatively difficult. Item 10, which
asked about the consumption of starch products such as
pasta, rice and maize, millet and sorghum flour meals,
was considered the easiest item (consumed by many) while
13
1392
Fig. 1  Item characteristics curves for the Windhoek Food Security Data
item 16 on the consumption of fish and item 17 on the
consumption of beans, nuts and lentils were considered
most difficulty (less consumed). Item 14 which collected
data on meat consumption also peaked downwards, imply-
ing that Windhoek households might have high meat con-
sumption patterns.
The discriminant parameter ( ai ) estimates for the items
are given in Fig. 4. The results show that the items in the
HDDS are less discriminating, that is, they contribute less to
the aggregate households' food insecurity levels compared
Fig. 2  Ability parameter esti-
mates for households
2
Ability param eter es tim ates
-2
0 250
13
V. Charamba et al.
to items in the HFIAS and the MIHFP testlets. For exam-
ple, item number 12 on vegetable consumption and number
16 on fish and seafood consumption were considered less
discriminating.
From the results in Table 4, households are distributed
according to their food insecurity levels from -3.54 (less
food insecure) to 3.03 (higher levels of food insecurity) with
an average of about 0. The first and second thresholds were
disordered as the first threshold is higher than the second
threshold while the third threshold was higher, implying
500 750 1000
Household
Application of Item response theory modelling to measure an aggregate 1393

Fig. 3  Item Difficulty parameter estimates

that the transition from Category 2 to Category 3 was easier on the food insecurity continuum. In addition, items in the
than the transition from Category 1 to Category 2. However, MIHFP testlet were more difficult compared to items in the
threshold 3 was higher, implying that the last category of HDDS testlet, implying that there were months when some
the HFIAS testlet was endorsed by households higher up Windhoek urban households had inadequate food supply.

Fig. 4  Item Discriminant parameter estimates

13
1394
Table 4  Parameter estimates for the Windhoek food security data
Testlet Parameter Min
Overall Abilitya -3.54
Discriminant
Testlet1(HFIAS) Threshold 1 -0.33
Threshold 2 -1.03
Threshold 3
Testlet 2 (HDDS) Difficulty 1 -3.27
Testlet 3 (MIHFP) Difficulty 2 -0.18
a
Ability denotes the distribution of food insecurity levels in Windhoek
3.1 Calculation of cut‑off points for categorization
of households into food insecurity classes
The values that were imputed into Eq. (1) to calculate the θ val-
ues for cut-off points 𝜏1, 𝜏2, and 𝜏3, are shown in Table 5. The
values were then used to categorize households according to
estimated food insecurity levels and classes in Table 6 results.
3.2 Comparison with other food security/
insecurity measures
The results are shown in Table 6, together with the categorisa-
tion from the Household Food Insecurity Access Prevalence
(HFIAP: see Nickanor et al., 2017; Charamba et al., 2019).
The results in Table 6 show that there isn’t much dif-
ference in the proportions of respondents categorized as
food insecure according to the different indices and this is
supported by high p-values from the Wilcoxon paired ranks
test (p > 0.05). However, the IRT index estimated more
food-secure households than the other indices.
Table 7 gives the correlation coefficients (in the upper
triangle) and Cohen’s Kappa (κ) lower triangle) values to
measure the correlation and agreement between food secu-
rity measures and categories respectively, for the different
measurement methods. The results showed that the IRT food
insecurity measure had the highest correlations and highest
values of the Cohen’s Kappa agreement with the individual
food insecurity scores that were aggregated in its formation,
thus the index is internally consistent. The IRT categories
had a substantial agreement (𝜅 = 0.644) with the HFIAP
categories and a fair agreement (𝜅 = 0.24) with the HDDS
food insecurity classes. Food insecurity decreased with
an increase in income levels with a moderate correlation
Table 5  Calculation of cut-off points for categorization of households
Probability Discriminant Difficulty Testlet Cut-off point
0.7 a1 = 1.508 b13 = -1.1500 𝛾11 = -0.1338 𝜏1 = -0.45433
0.7 a3 = 1.731 b33 = -0.9284 𝛾11 = -0.1338 𝜏2 = -0.30512
0.7 a6 = 2.061 b63 = -0.5934 𝛾11 = -0.1338 𝜏3 = -0.04849
13
V. Charamba et al.
Max Mean Std. Dev
3.03 -0.01 1.09
0.35 2.67 1.41 0.57
0.66 0.03 0.36
1.32 -0.32 0.68
0.87 2.02 1.20 0.37
4.49 -1.14 2.13
1.14 0.76 0.37
according to Mukaka (2012) (r = −0.533) and increase with
the LPI, with a moderate positive correlation (r = 0.679),
that is, low-income households in extreme poverty had
higher food insecurity levels. The IRT behaved as expected
against the LPI and the income levels. Making the index
externally valid.
4 Discussion
Poverty reduction, food insecurity and undernutrition remain
high on the development agenda. The need for coming up
with good food insecurity measurements for project target-
ing and governance cannot be underestimated. Targeting
based on poor indicators can be costlier than not targeting
at all. In practice, it is difficult to detect which measure is
best for which situation (Maxwell et al., 2013), and often-
times, indices classifications of households are not in agree-
ment. As such, having a single measure that captures all the
information presented by different indicators might be the
best alternative in food security measurement. The objec-
tive of the current study was to come up with an aggregate
food insecurity indicator for improved targeting of safety-
net, policy intervention and governance by incorporating
the household experiential perceptions on food insecurity
(HFIAS), dietary quality measure (HDDS) and the duration
of food insecurity (MIHFP) into one food access measure.
The metric can be constructed using evidence-based data
that can be collected timeously at a relatively low cost and
analysis as they can be collected/are usually collected in one
questionnaire, thus having limited effect on time and finan-
cial implications. In addition, the application of the testlet
model requires limited time and resources as free software
and programmes are readily available.
The category characteristic curves (CCC) for the com-
bined data showed monotonicity, that is, lower-order response
categories were more likely to be endorsed by food-secure
households while higher higher-order response categories
were most likely to be endorsed by households that were more
food insecure. Similar findings were observed by Charamba
Application of Item response theory modelling to measure an aggregate 1395

Table 6  Comparison of IRT and Model Food secure Mildly food Moderately food Severely food p-value
FANTA food security measures insecure insecure insecure

Testlet 22.1 3.5 7.3 67.1

HFIAP 16.4 3.4 13.2 67.1 0.992
HDDS 10.3 6.5 17.1 66.1 0.999
MIHFP* 10.1 3.4 19.1 67.3 0.996

et al. (2019) in their study to validate the use of the HFIAS
for the measurement of Windhoek households' food security
levels. The curve for the second category was flat, implying
that it was chosen by fewer respondents. This could imply
that due to income disparities in Windhoek, there is a higher
proportion of food secure and severely food insecure house-
holds than mildly and moderately food insecure. It could
also imply that the second category option was not neces-
sary for the Windhoek households. The difficulty param-
eter estimates for the HDDS testlet were lower, probably
because households endorsed similar food groups. How-
ever, the higher difficulty parameter for the MIHFP might
mean that the households had several months of inadequate
food provisioning.
The IRT food insecurity measure recorded the highest
correlation and level of agreement with the FANTA indica-
tors that were incorporated in its computation, suggesting
that the index is internally consistent and the single compo-
nents measured by these indicators were a proper represen-
tation of the individual metrics being combined. In addi-
tion, the metric behaved as expected, as it increased with
poverty levels, and MIHFP and decreased with increased
dietary quality and income levels suggesting that poorer
households had higher food insecurity levels. This is an
indication that the IRT measure can be further developed
into a food security measurement that combines access to
dietary variety and the months of inadequate household food
provision and anxiety and uncertainty, insufficient quality
and quantity food intake and their physical consequences
into one measure. The correlation coefficients and Cohen's
Kappa (κ) agreement measurements between the IRT food
security measures and the FANTA measurements were the
lowest for the HDDS. This is probably because the testlet
model considered the HDDS items to be less discriminating
compared to HFIAS and MIHFP items, which could be ema-
nating from a similar diet across households.
The current index has been noted to be internally con-
sistent and externally valid with moderated correlations
between the food insecurity status and LPI and income lev-
els, concurring with observations by McCordic et al. (2022)
who observed significant moderate correlations between
inconsistent access to water, medical facilities, electricity
and cash income against food insecurity index computed by
combining the HFIAS, HDDS and MAHFP via a mini-max
normalization and geometric means for aggregation. The
lower Kappa values for HDDS and MIHFP (against rela-
tively high correlations) may be because of the cut-off points
for categorization of the IRT, HDDS and MIHFP which is
non-standard and might be worth further investigation. The
prevalence estimates that each indicator provides are func-
tions of cut-off points used for the categorization of house-
holds into different food security classes. Since there are no
universally acceptable cut-offs for most of these measures,
these may be subject to further research and debate. The
cut-offs used in this paper are not intended for application
in other contexts without location-specific consideration
being considered. They are just meant to trigger investiga-
tion and debate on the possibility of combining several met-
rics of food insecurity into one measure. Further studies are
required on algorithms to come up with cut-off points for
different metrics, including the IRT metric itself. However,
the lower Kappa values might mean a different classifica-
tion of the same households by the indices. However, the
food insecurity classes were compared with income and LPI
quartiles. It might not necessarily be the case that food inse-
curity classes in Windhoek have equal representation and
this might have posed a challenge in the external validation
process used.

Table 7  Spearman’s rank IRT HFIAS HDDS MIHFP Income LPI

correlation and Cohen Kappa
agreement between metrics IRT 0.834a -0.579a 0.512a -0.533a 0.679a
HFIAS 0.644 -0.558a 0.499a -0.481a 0.661a
HDDS 0.240 0.215 0.351a 0.387a -0.584a
MIHFP 0.244 0.197 0.114 0.367a -0.617a
Income 0.440 0.340 0.140 0.428 -0.515a
LPI 0.514 0.388 0.213 0.434 0.680
a
Correlation significant at 0.01 level of significance

13
1396
The current study has been conducted on data collected
from urban households. However, the applicability of the
HFIAS, HDDS and MIHFP to urban households had been
questioned (Haysom & Tawodzera, 2018) as they had been
originally designed for application in rural communities. It
is worthy of further investigation to assess the applicabil-
ity of the current model to data collected from rural house-
holds to which these tools had been specifically designed.
Considering the income disparity and dietary diversity for
households in Windhoek, it might be worth further investi-
gation to incorporate a variable that accounts for subgroups
of respondents that might exist within a population (see
Wunderlich & Norwood, 2006).
The validity of the IRT propensity as a measure of food
security narrows down to whether the IRT latent construct
is associated with the true food security (Johnson, 2004).
Johnson (2004) added that if the true food security is not
related to the IRT construct, it doesn’t matter how well
the item responses and the construct adhere to the spe-
cific IRT model and thus can only be ascertained through
validity studies. A validity study suggested by Johnson
(2004) requires monitoring several individuals (house-
holds) over 12 months to determine their food security
status and then administer a food security tool, and then
conduct an analysis to determine the relationship between
the IRT propensity and the actual food security levels.
Further studies incorporating such a validity study might
be worth undertaking to assess the validity of using the
combined measure in different contexts. The proposed
measure does not cover all aspects of food access as those
go beyond what the HFIAS. HDDS and MIHFP measure,
but rather provide a proxy for its measurement.
McCordic et al. (2022) suggested normalizing the
HFIAS, HDDS and MAHFP before aggregating them so
that they maintain equal contribution, arguing that other
methods would only support household ranking other than
scoring. However, normalizing is not necessary for the
current model neither is equal contribution assumed. The
IRT model is advantageous as an estimation method in that
it provides mechanisms for assessing the contribution of
each item to each measure based on the item discrimina-
tion and item goodness of fit parameters (see Charamba
et al., 2019). In addition, it supports scoring as the latent
variable is measured on a continuous continuum. It will
be difficult to perform sensitivity analysis and confusion
matrices using the current model of food insecurity on a
continuous continuum and classification which is done
later, is not part of the model algorithm.
Although all the items in the HFIAS, HDDS and
MIHFP were used to calculate the current metric, the
items on vegetable and fish and seafood consumption had
lower discrimination ability, that is, they play a less signif-
icant role in separating households according to their food
13
V. Charamba et al.
insecurity levels and could have been dropped from the
analysis. The two items have been noticed by Charamba
et al. (2019) to have low (0.21) and negative (-0.41) dis-
crimination ability respectively and also have the highest
inlier-sensitive fit (infit) and outlier-sensitive fit (outfit)
statistics outside the acceptable range (Na et al., 2015;
Nord, 2014), implying that they do not fit well in the scale
for this data. Infit and outfit statistics, normally expressed
as the mean of summed squared standardized residuals
(MNSQ), indicate the goodness of fit of a test item to the
model and index being measured. Although the items had
a minimal contribution to scale, they were not dropped
from the analysis because the IRT scale was meant to be
an aggregate of the HFIAS, HDDS and MIHFP where
none of the items was dropped, and it was to be com-
pared against these individual scores for internal consist-
ency checks. However, for estimation purposes, one might
consider dropping off items with minimal contribution to
the latent measure. Item performance may not be universal
and need not be generalized to all data sets. For example,
items that performed poorly in the Windhoek households'
data set might behave differently in a different set-up with
different food systems. The lack of statistical differences
between the food security categories determined from the
IRT index observed in Table 6 could have been because
the statistical power has been compromised by a small
sample size (only four categories). However, the problem
of a small sample size could have been addressed by the
employment of a non-parametric test for comparison.
5 Conclusion and recommendations
Much of the demand for indicators of food insecurity is
to measure the impact of programmes, policies and to
determine household groups that require interventions.
The conceptual and measurement frameworks proposed in
the current study have presented opportunities for a more
holistic measure of food insecurity, as the proposed meas-
ure has been externally validated against other measures
of food security and household socio-economic status. In
addition, most food security measurements have been orig-
inally designed for measurement in rural settings, the com-
bined measure can provide an alternative for food insecu-
rity measurement in urban areas where food systems are
different and there is high-income disparity, especially in
Windhoek, and diets can be defined more by ethnicity that
food security levels, coupled with lack of formal safety-
nets The study can help in the translation of research into
policy as it avoids the use of single measures which might
not be congruent. However, the measure had only been
computed using a single urban sample in the Global South
and hence is not generalisable unless it is tested in several
Application of Item response theory modelling to measure an aggregate
different set-ups with different food systems, possibly both
rural and urban settings. It is difficult to establish cut-off
points for classifying households into different levels of
food insecurity. The empirical results in the current study
do not specifically provide the thresholds or cut-offs for
any of the indicators discussed, but only to trigger further
research and debate on a composite food insecurity met-
ric. Further research and analysis over a much broader
range of contexts will be required to empirically assess the
applicability of the proposed model in measuring house-
hold food insecurity to substantiate the current findings
and document if the proposed food insecurity construct
applies to different contexts. Considering that data similar
to common metrics such as the HFSSM, the FCS had been
incorporated into the scale, further research may consider
incorporating other metrics such as the CSI into the com-
putation of the food insecurity construct using the testlet
model. For the IRT measure, cut-off points will require
suggestions from Johnson (2004).
Acknowledgements The researchers acknowledge the Open Society
Foundation for South Africa, the former Department of Statistics and
Population Studies (University of Namibia), the African Food Security
Urban Network (AFSUN), the Hungry Cities Partnership (HCP) and
the Balsillie School of International Affairs (BSIA) for the secondary
data that was used in this research.
Funding Open access funding provided by University of Namibia.
Data availability The data is available from the authors upon request.
Declarations
Conflict of interests The authors declare no conflicts of interest re-
garding the publication of this paper.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attri-
bution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adapta-
tion, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source,
provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes
were made. The images or other third party material in this article are
included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated
otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in
the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not
permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will
need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a
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Leroy, J., Ruel, M., Frongillo, A., Harris, J., & Ballard, T. (2015). Vonai Charamba is a SeniorLec-
Measuring the food access dimension of food security: A critical turer (Biostatistician) at the Uni-
review and mapping of indicators. Food and Nutrition Bulletin, versity of Namibia. She studied
36, 167–195. for her PhD in Science (Statis-
Lunn, D. J., Thomas, A., Best, N., & Spiegelhalter, D. (2000). WinBUGS tics) at the University of Namibia
— a Bayesian modelling framework: Concepts, structure, and exten- and BSc and MSc in Science
sibility. Statistics and Computing, 10, 325–337. (Statistics) at the University of
Maxwell, D., Coates, J., & Vaitla, B. (2013). How do different indi- Zimbabwe. She is currently
cators of household food security compare? Empirical evidence teaching Biostatistics, Biometry
from Tigray (pp. 1–19). Feinstein International Cente. and Research Methods modules
Mattes, R., Dulani, B., & Gyimah-Boadi, E. (2016). Africa’s growth to undergraduate and postgradu-
dividend? Lived poverty drops across much of the continent. ate students in the School of
Afrobarometer. Agriculture and Fisheries Sciences and the School of Health Sciences
McCordic, C., Frayne, B., Sunu, N., & Williamson, C. (2022). The house- and Veterinary Medicine, at the University of Namibia. Her research
hold food security implications of disrupted access to basic services interests are in the application of Item Response Theory Modelling to
in five cities in the global south. Land, 11(5), 654. social research, Application of Generalized Linear Models to Agricul-
Mock, N., Morrow, N., & Papendieck, A. (2013). From complexity tural Research (Food security and sustainable agriculture), Bayesian
to food security decision-support: Novel methods of assessment Inference, Climate change and Social research. Vonai strongly advo-
and their role in enhancing the timeliness and relevance of food cates student-centred teaching and learning where students learn
and nutrition security information. Global Food Security, 2(1), through hands-on application. She believes learning is a cycle where
41–49. one continually learns from students and colleagues through informa-
Mukaka, M. M. (2012). A guide to appropriate use of correlation coef- tion dissemination. She has published some Agriculture, Climate
ficient in medical research. Malawi Medical Journal, 24(3), 69–71. change and Food Security work in peer-reviewed journals and had
Mutea, E., Bottazzi, P., Jacobi, J., Kiteme, B., Speranza, C. I., & Rist, S. several conference presentations.
(2019). Livelihoods and food security among rural households in the
north-western Mount Kenya region. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Lawrence N. Kazembe is a Pro-
Systems, 3, 98. fessor of Applied Statistics at the
Na, M., Gross, A. L., & West, K. P. (2015). Validation of the food University of Namibia. He previ-
access survey tool to assess household food insecurity in rural ously served as a Senior Biostat-
Bangladesh. BMC Public Health, 15, 1–10. istician at Malawi Liverpool
Namibia Statistics Agency. (2013). Namibia 2011 population and hous- We l l c o m e Tr u st C l i n i c a l
ing census: Main report. Windhoek, Namibia: Namibia Statistics Research Programme in Blan-
Agency. tyre, Malawi; consultant statisti-
National Research Council. (2005). Measuring food insecurity and cian with Malaria Alert Centre;
hunger: Phase 1 report. National Academies Press. and as a research fellow at Medi-
Nickanor, N., Kazembe, L., Crush, J., & Wagner, J. (2017). The super- cal Research Council of South
market revolution and food security in Namibia (rep., pp. i-87). Africa, Durban in the Malaria
Kingston, ON and Cape Town: African Food Security Urban Net- Lead Research Programme. He
work. Urban Food Security Series No. 26. has published extensively, with over 100 peer-reviewed publications in
Nord, M. (2014). Introduction to item response theory applied to food food security, malaria research and population health. In 2008, he was
security measurement: Basic concepts, parameters, and statis- recognized as a young scientist and in 2009, he was accorded a young
tics. Retrieved June 30, 2018, from http://w ​ ww.f​ ao.o​ rg/e​ conom
​ ic/​ research affiliate award by the Academy of Sciences in Developing
ess/​ess-​fs/​voices/​en Countries (TWAS), and a young biometrician medal from the Sub-
Oldewage-Theron, W. H., & Kruger, R. (2008). Food variety and die- Saharan Network of International Biometrics Society (SUSAN-IBS),
tary diversity as indicators of the dietary adequacy and health sta- in 2009. He has supervised over 10 PhDs and 50 MSc graduates. His
tus of an elderly population in Sharpeville, South Africa. Journal main research interests are in Bayesian statistical modelling and spatial
of Nutrition for the Elderly, 27(1–2), 101–133. analysis with applications in population health.
Swindale, A., & Bilinsky, P. (2006). Household dietary diversity score
(HDDS) for measurement of household food access: Indicator Ndeyapo Nickanor is an Associ-
guide. Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance Project, Academy ate Professor in the Department
for Educational Development. of Computing, Mathematical and
United Nations. (1975). Report of the World Food Conference. United Statistical Science in the School
Nations. of Science as well as the Execu-
Vellema, W., Desiere, S., & Haese, M. (2016). Verifying validity of tive Dean of the Faculty of Agri-
the household dietary diversity score: An application of Rasch culture, Engineering and Natural
modelling. Food and Nutrition Bulletin, 37, 27–41. Science at the University of
Wang, W. C., & Wilson, M. (2005). Exploring local item dependence Namibia. She is a research affili-
using a random effects facet model. Applied Psychological Meas- ate of the African Food Security
urement, 29(4), 296–318. Urban Network (AFSUN), which
Webb, P., Coates, J., Frongillo, A., Rogers, B., Swindale, A., & Bil- continues to extensively research
insky, P. (2006). Measuring household food insecurity: Why it’s food security in Southern Africa
so important and yet so difficult to do. Journal of Nutrition, 136, and the Hungry Cities Partner-
1404S-1408S. ship (HCP). She is also working with the African Centre for Cities at the
Wunderlich, G. S., & Norwood, J. L. (2006). Food insecurity and hun- University of Cape Town as part of the IDRC-funded Nourishing Spaces
ger in the United States. National Academies Press. Project. Her research interest continues to grow in the food security area.

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