Can qualitative and quantitative methods serve complementary purposes for policy research?

Qualitative and quantitative methods in social science research have long been separate spheres with little overlap. However, recent innovations have highlighted the complementarity of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The Accra Food and Nutrition Security Study was designed to incorporate the participation of a variety of constituencies in the research, and to rely on a variety of approaches — both qualitative and quantitative — to data collection and analysis. This paper reviews the way in which qualitative and quantitative methods were used in the Accra study. The argument of the paper is that the complementary use of qualitative and quantitative approaches provides a greater range of insights and perspectives and permits triangulation or the confirmation of findings by different methods, which improves the overall validity of results, and makes the study of greater use to the constituencies to which it was intended to be addressed. But the search for truly complementary methods presents substantial challenges as well. These include extra costs, both in financial and human terms, ethical dilemmas regarding follow-up, and the need for teamwork and respect for different methodological and epistemological positions.Nutrition Research. ,Social sciences Methodology. ,

Measuring food insecurity

Defining and interpreting food security, and measuring it in reliable, valid and cost-effective ways, have proven to be stubborn problems facing researchers and programs intended to monitor food security risks. This paper briefly reviews the conceptual and methodological literature on food insecurity measurement, describes a particular method for distinguishing and measuring short-term food insecurity at the household level, and discusses ways of generalizing the method. The method developed enumerates the frequency and severity of strategies relied on by urban households when faced with a short-term insufficiency of food. This method goes beyond more commonly-used measures of caloric consumption to incorporate vulnerability elements of food insecurity as well as the deliberate actions of household decisionmakers when faced with food insufficiency.food security ,Research Methodology ,

Does urban agriculture help prevent malnutrition?

Previous research has suggested that urban agriculture has a positive impact on the household food security and nutritional status of low-socioeconomic status groups in cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, but a formal test of the link between semisubsistence urban food production and nutritional status has not accompanied these claims. This paper seeks to redress this gap in the growing literature on urban agriculture through an analysis of the determinants of the nutritional status of children under five in Kampala, Uganda, where roughly one-third of all households in the sample engage in some form of urban agriculture. When controlling for other individual child, maternal, and household characteristics, these data indicate that urban agriculture has a positive, significant association with higher nutritional status of children, particularly height-for-age. Several pathways by which this relationship is manifested are suggested, and the implications of these results for urban food and nutrition policy and urban management are briefly discussed.Food policies. ,Urban agriculture. ,Food security Household. ,Children Nutrition. ,Nutritional status ,

The political economy of urban food security in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan African cities in the late 1990s face a daunting set of problems including rapid growth, increasing poverty, deteriorating infrastructure, and inadequate capacity for service provision. However, even as a renewed debate is shaping up around issues of urban development, there is little attention given to the question of urban food security and nutrition. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, urban food problems in Africa commanded political attention, the nature of urban food insecurity in the 1990s is such that it has tended to lose political importance. This is largely because in the 1970s, the problem was one of outright food shortages and rapid price changes that affected large portions of the urban population simultaneously. The impact of structural adjustment, continued rapid growth, and an increase in urban poverty make food insecurity in the 1990s primarily a problem of access by the urban poor. Under circumstances where the urban poor spend a very large portion of their total income on food, urban poverty rapidly translates into food insecurity. The lack of formal safety nets, and the shifting of responsibility for coping with food insecurity away from the state towards the individual and household level has tended to atomize and muffle any political response to this new urban food insecurity. This paper briefly reviews urban food insecurity and generates a set of empirical questions for an analysis of food and livelihood security in contemporary urban Sub-Saharan Africa, and then examines historical and contemporary evidence from Kampala, Uganda, and Accra, Ghana, to suggest some tentative conclusions.Food security Africa, Sub-Saharan. ,Nutrition programs Africa. ,Urban poor Africa. ,

Does geographic targeting of nutrition interventions make sense in cities?

Although most developing country cities are characterized by pockets of substandard housing and inadequate service provision, it is not known to what degree low incomes and malnutrition are confined to specific neighborhoods. This analysis uses representative household surveys of Abidjan and Accra to quantify small-area clustering in service provision, demographic characteristics, consumption, and nutrition. Both cities showed significant clustering in housing conditions but not in nutrition, while income was clustered in Abidjan, but less so in Accra. This suggests that neighborhood targeting of poverty-alleviation or nutrition interventions in these and similar cities could lead to undercoverage of the truly needy.Food consumption. ,Human Nutrition. ,Urban poor Africa. ,Malnutrition Africa. ,Africa. ,

The constraints to good child care practices in Accra

Life in urban areas presents special challenges for maternal child care practices. Data from a representative survey of households with children less than 3 years of age in Accra were used to test a number of hypothesized constraints to child care, including various maternal (education, employment, marital status, age, health, ethnic group, migration status) and household-level factors (income, calorie availability, quality of housing and asset ownership, availability of services, household size, and crowding). An age-specific child care index was created using recall data on maternal child feeding practices and use of preventive health services. A hygiene index was created from spot check observations of proxies of hygiene behaviors. Multivariate analyses showed that maternal schooling was the most consistent constraint to both the care and the hygiene index. None of the household-level characteristics were associated with the care index, but better housing quality and access to garbage collection services were associated with better hygiene. Female head of household and larger family size were associated with poorer hygiene. The programmatic implications of these findings for nutrition education and behavior change interventions in Accra are discussed. The focus is on using the information to target the right practices to be modified as well as the main constraints to their adoption.FCND ,Child care. ,Ghana. ,Maternal and infant welfare Developing countries. ,Urban health. ,

Good care practices can mitigate the negative effects of poverty and low maternal schooling on children's nutritional status

This study uses data from a representative survey of households with preschoolers in Accra, Ghana to (1) examine the importance of care practices for children's height-for-age z-scores (HAZ); and (2) identify subgroups of children for whom good maternal care practices may be particularly important. Good caregiving practices related to child feeding and use of preventive health services were a strong determinant of children's HAZ, specially among children from the two lower income terciles and children whose mothers had less than secondary schooling. In this population, good care practices could compensate for the negative effects of poverty and low maternal schooling on children's HAZ. Thus, effective targeting of specific education messages to improve child feeding practices and use of preventive health care could have a major impact on reducing childhood malnutrition in Accra.Health services. ,Child care. ,Child Feeding. ,Poverty. ,

Evaluation of Bagging to Extend Storage Life of Wet and Modified Distillers Grains—A Demonstration Project

The ethanol industry is rapidly expanding. As much as 40% of the energy cost is associated with drying the feed co-products. Distillers grains are excellent sources of nutrients for the diets of beef cattle, but have a short shelf life. To expand the use of wet distillers feeds to more producers, longer term storage methods are required