Despite the international community’s emphasis on the need to achieve food security, there is still much debate surrounding its measurement, due mainly to its multidimensional aspects. This paper investigates the capacity of a new type of measure, food security scales, to capture dimensions of food security that other measures, such as food expenditures, caloric availability and food diversity, may miss. Drawing on nationally representative household panel data from Malawi, Nigeria and Tanzania, I find that the scale is a useful complementary measure to standard measures. Cross-section and panel analysis shows that the scale provides further insights into food vulnerability and coping strategies characteristic of food insecurity, dimensions not captured by the standard measures.
