Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

The Individual Water Insecurity Experiences (Iwise) Scale: Reliability, Equivalence And Validity Of An Individual-Level Measure Of Water Security, Sera L. Young, Hilary J. Bethancourt, Zacchary R. Ritter, Edward A. Frongillo Jr.

Faculty Publications

Objective: The lack of a validated and cross-culturally equivalent scale for measuring individual-level water insecurity has prevented identification of those most vulnerable to it. Therefore, we developed the 12-item Individual Water InSecurity Experiences (IWISE) Scale to comparably measure individual experiences with access, use, and stability (reliability) of water. Here, we examine the reliability, cross-country equivalence, and cross-country and within-country validity of the scale in a cross-sectional sample.

Methods: IWISE items were implemented by the Gallup World Poll among nationally representative samples of 43 970 adults (15 y) in 31 low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). Internal consistency was assessed …

Perspective: The Importance Of Water Security For Ensuring Food Security, Good Nutrition, And Well-Being, Sera L. Young, Edward A. Frongillo Jr., Zeina Jamaluddine, Hugo Melgar-Quiñonez, Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, Claudia Ringler, Asher Y. Rosinger

Faculty Publications

Water security is a powerful concept that is still in its early days in the field of nutrition. Given the prevalence and severity of water issues and the many interconnections between water and nutrition, we argue that water security deserves attention commensurate with its importance to human nutrition and health. To this end, we first give a brief introduction to water insecurity and discuss its conceptualization in terms of availability, access, use, and stability. We then lay out the empirical grounding for its assessment. Parallels to the food-security literature are drawn throughout, both because the concepts are analogous and food …

Validity Of A Four-Item Household Water Insecurity Experiences Scale For Assessing Water Issues Related To Health And Well-Being, Sera L. Young, Joshua D. Miller, Edward A. Frongillo Jr., Godfred O. Boateng, Zeina Jamaluddine, Torsten B. Neilands

Faculty Publications

We sought to determine whether a shortened version of the 12-item Household Water Insecurity Experiences (HWISE) Scale, which measures water insecurity equivalently in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), is valid for broad use. Using data from 9,261 households in 25 LMICs, subsets of candidate items were evaluated on their predictive accuracy, criterion validity, and sensitivity-specificity. A subset with items assessing "worry," "changing plans," "limited drinking water," and "inability to wash hands" because of problems with water (range: 0-12) were highly correlated with full HWISE Scale scores (correlation coefficient: 0.949-0.980) and introduced minimal additional error (root mean square error: 2.13-2.68). Criterion …