Longitudinal Food Insecurity or Food Poverty Candian Survey

Question

A researcher at MRU mentioned that they were looking for a Canadian longitudinal food insecurity or food poverty survey... Does anyone know if such as survey exists, please? Or can the researcher use one of our already existing  DLI surveys?

Answer

Variables related to food insecurity are available in the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY - http://www.statcan.gc.ca/dli-ild/data-donnees/ftp/nlscy-elnej-eng.htm) and the National Population Health Survey (NPHS - http://www.statcan.gc.ca/dli-ild/data-donnees/ftp/nphs-ensp-eng.htm).

However, in order to protect respondents from the disclosure of their identity, recent PUMFs from these surveys aren't available in the DLI collection (they stop in 1998-1999).  If the researcher wishes to use these surveys, he/she could use the synthetic files that are in the DLI collection and request data through remote job submission (important note: Synthetic files contain modified data and must never be used for analytical purposes. The synthetic files should not be used for purposes other than to develop and test the computer programs that are to be submitted by remote job submission.) or access the master files in the Research Data Centres (RDCs).

Other surveys like the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) (and CCHS 2.2 and 3.1 in particular) also include variables on food insecurity.

To quickly browse these variables, you could access the StatCan Nesstar site (www62.statcan.ca) and do an Advanced Search for variables containing the word "food".

I hope that these suggestions are helpful.