METHODS
Inspired by Amber Wutich and Alex Brewis’s awesome article on food and water insecurity in Current Anthropology, we decided to add water insecurity questions to our pregnancy cohort in western Kenya – except there weren’t any obvious scales appropriate for this setting. So, we looked to some of the great work on water insecurity that had already been done, including that of Jed Stevenson, Craig Hadley , Wendy Jepson, Amber Wutich and colleagues.
After a lot of formative work, including the Delphi Methodology with international experts, we arrived at what we hope is an exhaustive list of water insecurity-related experiences. This module, along with a few other short survey modules (e.g. on demographics, stress, water access) is being administered across a number of sites around the world in 2017-18. We will then perform a series of analyses to reduce the number of items in the scale and assess its validity and reliability across sites.