Development and psychometric evaluation of the School-based Food Insecurity Experience Scale in Masaka District, Uganda

This project evaluates the psychometric properties of the School-based Food Insecurity Experience Scale (SFIES), a child-reported instrument designed to measure school-based food insecurity experiences as an experiential psychological construct. The SFIES was developed to capture children’s lived experiences of food insecurity during the school day, such as hunger, worry, or exclusion from food-related activities, that are not adequately assessed by existing household-level food insecurity measures or caregiver reports. The study is grounded in psychological measurement theory and conceptualises school-based food insecurity as a context-specific form of stress exposure, experienced subjectively by children within educational settings. Because these experiences involve internal states and situational perceptions that cannot be reliably inferred from household conditions, the SFIES is administered directly to children. The scale is intended for use among day scholars, defined as learners who attend school or college during the day but return to their own homes to eat and sleep, rather than living on campus in school residences or hostels, a population for whom access to food during school hours is often uncertain and dependent on both household resources and the functioning of school-based food provision. Data were collected from 661 school-aged children (7–13 years) attending three government-aided primary schools in Masaka District, Uganda, with assessments conducted at baseline (T0) and again after a 14-day follow-up (T1). The project follows a pre-specified analytic framework aligned with the Consensus-based Standards for the Selection of Health Measurement INstruments (COSMIN) to evaluate multiple measurement properties. Content validity was addressed through forward–backward translation, cognitive pretesting, and quantitative assessment of face validity. Quantitative psychometric evaluation will include analyses of internal consistency reliability, test–retest reliability, structural validity (factor structure), criterion-related validity (including concurrent and predictive validity using theoretically related external measures), and construct validity, assessed through structural validity, convergent associations, and exploratory measurement invariance across sex and age groups.” The primary expected outcome of this research is to determine whether the SFIES functions as a reliable and valid psychological measure of school-based food insecurity experiences in the study context. By focusing on psychometric evaluation rather than substantive outcome effects, the project aims to contribute a validated measurement tool to support future research on children’s lived experiences of deprivation within schools, particularly in resource-limited settings. All hypotheses, analytic expectations, adequacy thresholds, and deviation policies were specified a priori in accordance with open-science and preregistration best practices.