Households and Persons Having Problems with Access to Food: (Statistical Abstract 2008 Table 0202)

The Statistical Abstract files are distributed by the census department as excel files. These files have data mixed with notes and references, multiple tables per sheet, and worst of all the table headers aren’t easily matched to their rows and columns.
The excel files in this collection are unmolested copies of the census originals, with the following exceptions:

1. A few files had extraneous characters in the title. These were
   corrected to be consistent. A few files have a sheet of crufty
   gibberish in the first slot. The sheet order was shuffled but no
   data were changed.

1. The first four files have been restructured to allow full
   comprehension of the table. If you’d like to help clean up the data
   follow along with what’s there.

The CSV files, and the payload portions of the yaml files, have not been processed beyond extracting an array (excel sheets) of 2-D arrays (each sheet’s cells).

Some metadata (title, footnotes, symbols, and sources) has been copied (without molesting the imported stream) into the appropriate slot in this schema. This metadata identification was purposefully done to be strict and simple, and the original files are somewhat irregular, so it’s possible that some metadata fields were missed

These files have been tagged by hand and received cursory inspection, but you’re advised to check against the originals before you go lauching any Mars rovers.

Notes (pg 2)

1. Prior to 2006, USDA described these households as food insecure without hunger.
2. Food intake of one or more members in these households was reduced
   and normal eating patterns disruped at some time during the year
   because of the household’s food insecurity. Prior to 2006, USDA
   described these households as food insecure with hunger.
3. Food intake of one or more children in these households was reduced
   and their normal eating patterns were disrupted at some time during the
   year because of the household’s food insecurity. Prior to 2006, USDA
   described these households as food insecure with hunger among children.
   Percent distribution of households with very low food security among children
   excludes households with no child from the denominator.

[Food-secure means that a household had access at all times to enough food for an
active healthy life for all household members, with no need for recourse to
socially unacceptable food sources or extraordinary coping behaviors
to meet their basic food needs. Food-insecure households had limited or uncertain
ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.
Households with very low food security (a subset of food-insecure households) were those
in which food intake of one or more household members was reduced and normal eating patterns
disrupted due to inadequate resources for food. The severity of food insecurity in households
is measured through a series of questions about experiences and behaviors known to characterize
households that are having difficulty meeting basic food needs. These experiences and behaviors
generally occur in an ordered sequence as the severity of food insecurity increases.
As resources become more constrained, adults in typical households first worry about
having enough food, then they stretch household resources and juggle other necessities, then
decrease the quality and variety of household members’ diets, then decrease the frequency and
quantity of adults’ food intake, and finally decrease the frequency and quantity of children’s food
intake. All questions refer to the previous 12 months and include a qualifying phrase
reminding respondents to report only those occurrences that resulted from inadequate financial
resources. Restrictions to food intake due to dieting or busy schedules are excluded.
The omission of homeless persons may be a cause of underreporting.
Data are from the Food Security Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS);
for details about the CPS, see text, Section 1, Population, and Appendix III]

table: [32, 13]

0202

2008