Coping Strategies Index

Outcome

Impact

mean Coping Strategies Index (CSI) score among surveyed households

The Coping Strategies Index (CSI) is a context-specific indicator used to assess household food-access stress by measuring the extent to which households engage in consumption-related coping strategies when they lack sufficient food or money to buy food. The indicator produces a numerical score reflecting the frequency and severity of these coping behaviours. Higher scores indicate greater use of coping strategies and therefore greater food-access stress. Compared to the Reduced Coping Strategy Index (rCSI) indicator, the full CSI presented here is adapted to local coping behaviours and is best suited to monitoring changes over time within the same context.

Determine the indicator's value by using the following methodology:

     

1) Identify the main locally relevant consumption-related coping strategies that target households use when they do not have enough food or money to buy food. Identify these strategies through focus group discussions with people from the target population. You can use the list of common strategies in the CSI Field Methods Manual (see below), or those identified by the Food Security Cluster if available, as a starting point. Adjust the list to the local context so that it includes only strategies that are actually used during food-insecure periods. Do not include strategies that people do not use or that are common even when households are food secure, such as collecting wild food from the river.

  

2) Identify how "severe" each of these individual coping strategies is considered to be. Collect this information through several community-level focus group discussions representing the main relevant social groups, seeking a reasonable consensus on the relative severity of each strategy. The CSI manual recommends at least 6–8 focus groups for each culture or location. Assign a weight using ordered severity categories; a scale from 1 (least severe) to 4 (most severe) usually works well.

  

3) Conduct interviews with a representative sample of the target households. In each household, interview the person who is most knowledgeable about food preparation and whether household members have enough to eat. For each coping strategy, ask on how many days the household used it during the last 7 days and record a value from 0 to 7.

  

4) During the data analysis, for each coping strategy, multiply the assigned "weight" by its frequency, to obtain the score for each strategy. Do this separately for each surveyed household.

  

5) For each household, sum the scores of all assessed coping strategies to obtain the total Coping Strategies Index (CSI) score. A higher score indicates more frequent and/or more severe use of coping strategies and therefore greater food-access stress.

  

6) To determine the indicator value, add the valid household CSI scores and divide by the number of households with a valid CSI score.

This data can be disaggregated by geographical area, gender of the household head and, if relevant and feasible, also by displacement status, wealth group, and household composition.

1) Severity weights should reflect community perceptions and be derived through the focus group process described above, rather than being assigned by project staff or external experts. Follow the steps in CSI manual provided below.

2) Invest enough effort into carefully identifying and selecting the most common coping strategies you want to assess. Furthermore, make sure that all data collectors understand the difference between these strategies, as some of them might seem quite similar.

3) Do not assess a high number of coping strategies - respondents as well as enumerators get tired of being asked/ asking similar questions and are more likely to provide less precise answers. If possible, limit the number to no more than 10 strategies.

  

4) CSI is prone to significant seasonal differences. Do your best to collect baseline and endline data at the same time of year; otherwise it is very likely that they will not be comparable. When interpreting change, also consider major shocks, food prices, assistance and other contextual factors before attributing a change in CSI to the programme.

  

5) The Reduced Coping Strategy Index (rCSI) is a simplified version of this indicator using five standard behaviours and fixed severity weights. Use the rCSI when you need a short, standardised measure for comparability across locations, and the full CSI when you want to capture local coping patterns or track changes in one area over time.

Also consider using the following indicators:

• Reduced Coping Strategy Index (rCSI) (provides a standardised consumption-coping measure when comparison across places or time is required)

• Food Consumption Score (complements coping data with a measure of recent household food consumption)

• Livelihood Coping Strategies – Food Security (LCS-FS) (captures longer-term livelihood coping that should not be included in the consumption-based CSI)

• Household Hunger Scale (adds a standardised measure of severe household food deprivation where hunger is an important concern)