When:
The CSI can be used as a measure of the impact of both emergency and long-term interventions. Because the CSI can pick up relatively short-term changes in behavior, it can provide information on the way in which food assistance (or other emergency intervention aimed at addressing food insecurity) has or has not had the intended impact.
The CSI tool can also be used to track the impact on household food security of longer-term interventions. Be aware that the CSI is sensitive to short-term changes such as seasonality, or the effects of shocks, however major or minor. If being used to track long-term interventions, ensure that short-term influences such as seasonality are factored out of the analysis (for example, by conducting a baseline survey and an impact evaluation survey at the same time of the year/harvest cycle, etc.).
Determine the indicator's value by using the following methodology:
1) Identify the most frequent coping strategies which local people use when they do not have enough food and do not have enough money to buy food. While you can take advantage of a list of the most common strategies included in WFP's guidance (see below) or those identified by the Food Security Cluster (if available), you might need to adjust the list to make it more context-specific, so that only strategies that are locally used during food insecure times are included in the survey. There is no point in asking people about strategies they do not use or strategies that are common even in food secure periods, such as collecting wild food in the river.
2) Identify how "severe" each of these individual coping strategies is considered to be. Such information needs to be collected from community-level focus group discussions, providing a "weight" for the perceived severity of each strategy (1 - low, 2 - medium, 3 - severe).
3) Conduct individual interviews with a representative sample of the target group members to assess how frequently people had to use these strategies in the assessed recall period (e.g. twice in the past 7 days).
4) During the data analysis, for each coping strategy, multiply the assigned "weight" with its frequency, receiving the "score" per each strategy.
5) By summing up the scores of all assessed strategies you will receive the total Coping Strategy Index score. A high score means an extensive use of negative coping strategies and hence increased food insecurity.
6) The scores are usually divided into three categories: low CSI score (0-50), medium (51-100) and high (over 100). However, these thresholds often need to be modified based on the context and the number of coping strategies you assess (e.g. to 0-40; 41-80; and over 80). If you use the indicator for your baseline/ endline, you will be aiming to reduce the percentage of households in the highest CSI category.
