Applying the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES)
The FIES provides reliable information collected at the country level and disseminated in a timely manner. This can strengthen evidence-based decisions aimed at improving food security. Used in combination with other measures, the FIES has the potential to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the causes and consequences of food insecurity and to inform more effective policies and interventions. FIES is easy for professionals and institutions from any sector to use and its inclusion in diverse types of surveys can help strengthen links between different sectorial perspectives, for example, between agriculture, social protection, health and nutrition.
The FIES Survey Module
The FIES-SM questions refer to the experiences of the individual respondent or of the respondent’s household as a whole. The questions focus on self-reported food-related behaviors and experiences associated with increasing difficulties in accessing food due to resource constraints.
During the last 12 months, was there a time when, because of lack of money or other resources:
- You were worried you would not have enough food to eat?
- You were unable to eat healthy and nutritious food?
- You ate only a few kinds of foods?
- You had to skip a meal?
- You ate less than you thought you should?
- Your household ran out of food?
- You were hungry but did not eat?
- You went without eating for a whole day?
Useful links
Download the FIES survey modules
Individual and household-referenced versions of the survey module are
provided in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.
Which FIES survey module should you use?
The FIES Survey Module (FIES-SM) consists of eight questions regarding people's access to adequate food and can be easily integrated into various types of population surveys. Multiple versions of the FIES-SM are available, and the choice of FIES-SM version depends on whether the objective is to assess:
- food security at the individual or household level;
- annual (12-month reference period) or recent (30-reference period) food insecurity; and
- food security in humanitarian or food crisis contexts where prevalence is expected to be very high, in which case follow-up frequency questions can help distinguish better within the severe food insecurity classification.
The food insecurity experience scale survey module (FIES-SM)
Which FIES survey module is right for your objectives?
Translation and linguistic adaptation
Access here translations of the FIES-SM (individual version) used in the Gallup World Poll in more than 170 languages and dialects. Search by country, language or dialect.
Lessons learned from linguistic adaptations of the FIES-SM and feedback from the field have been incorporated into an explanatory document to guide translation efforts and enumerator training. Download the translation guide with intended meanings of the questions and specific terms:
Resources
FIES e-learning course
This self-paced FIES e-learning course leads learners through five lessons covering:
- The decision to adopt the FIES for food security monitoring;
- The inclusion of the FIES-SM within a survey;
- The statistical validation of FIES data;
- The calculation of estimates of food insecurity prevalence;
- The effective communication of FIES results.
FIES training webinar series
This series of videos provides step-by-step instruction on the theory behind experience-based food security scales and the application of the Rasch model for analysis of FIES data.