Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This presentation provides a summary of the motivation, process, and status of a collaborative federal effort to develop a housing insecurity survey module that is transferrable across household surveys and studies. The module will serve as the basis of a validated composite index of housing insecurity.

Researchers, policy makers, and program leaders regularly invoke the concept of housing insecurity in marshalling evidence to inform decision making and improve outcomes. In the absence of a unified definition and measure, however, the transactional costs of building evidence in this field can be high given the time and effort required to cultivate and choose between a variety of potential measures. Similarly, making use of evidence requires a detailed investigation of each study’s unique definition and measures. This fragmented approach to building, applying, sharing, and understanding evidence on housing needs, trade-offs, and correlates stands in contrast to the widely-understood standardized continuum of food security measured by the transferable U.S. Household Food Security Survey Module.

This paper will expand on previous research on the need for a housing insecurity index and address why traditional measures of housing cost burden and quality are insufficient for constructing a measure that is transferable across household surveys. This paper will then introduce the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s efforts to design a national housing insecurity research module to be implemented as a follow-on to the 2019 American Housing Survey. The paper will identify how the module’s design is expected to move us toward developing a validated index of housing insecurity. Discussion will include motivating scale development factors in designing the module; the basis of the module’s sampling frame; and plans to assess the validity of a resulting index using contextual questions about stress and basic needs trade-offs, food security index scores, and core affordability and quality measures from the most comprehensive national housing survey in the United States.