Abstract
We are studying a novel way to measure food security in hard-to-reach areas. We will compare food security measures collected from four different groups: (i) in-person respondents sampled in the traditional fashion (village listing + random selection), (ii) in-person respondents sampled in the traditional fashion that have a phone and agree to be surveyed by phone, (iii) phone survey respondents sampled in the traditional fashion but interviewed by phone, and (iv) phone survey respondents sampled using a novel "phone tree" method of snowball sampling, which is fully remote and does not require travel to the study area. The experimental variation arises between groups (ii) and (iii), where households will be randomly assigned to in-person or phone surveys. The phone tree group simulates what it would be like to collect food security data in a new location, without traveling there or sending a team. Our goal is to understand the magnitude of the biases that emerge from using the phone tree method to measure food security in hard-to-reach areas, and to explore whether certain types of questions can be useful in reducing those biases.