摘要：Objectives . We sought to identify factors associated with adult or child hunger. Methods . Low-income housed and homeless mothers were interviewed about socioeconomic, psychosocial, health, and food sufficiency information. Multinomial logistic regression produced models predicting adult or child hunger. Results . Predictors of adult hunger included mothers’ childhood sexual molestation and current parenting difficulties, or “hassles.” Risk factors for child hunger included mothers’ childhood sexual molestation, housing subsidies, brief local residence, having more or older children, and substandard housing. Conclusions . This study found that the odds of hunger, although affected by resource constraints in low-income female-headed families, were also worsened by mothers’ poor physical and mental health. Eliminating hunger thus may require broader interventions than food programs. During the past 2 decades, numerous efforts have been made to define, operationalize, and measure the extent of hunger in the United States. 1– 12 Largely based on previously developed items, 3, 6, 8, 10– 17 a multi item food insecurity and hunger measure was recently devised by the US government. 18– 23 This measure has been used since 1995, 24, 25 and the US government currently estimates that 10.1% of households—31 million Americans—are food insecure; of these, 3 million households experience hunger. 26 Several studies have examined economic and sociodemographic factors predisposing a household to food insecurity or hunger, 3, 6, 8, 27– 32 but few studies describing other risk factors exist. Moreover, no study has examined the role of family member characteristics. Given previous research showing that food insecurity and hunger are a managed process, 3, 6– 8, 11– 13, 33 we explored family characteristics that could affect mothers’ managerial capacity in homeless and housed female-headed families. We defined hunger as resource-constrained food insufficiency. Independent variables included sociodemographic factors, maternal and family risk indicators (mental health and substance abuse, family violence, limited social support, residential instability, and homelessness), and protective factors (housing subsidies, emergency food program use, and participation in publicly funded programs). We hypothesized hunger to be positively associated with factors compromising a mother’s managerial capacity or limiting her family’s resources and negatively associated with protective factors. We sought to identify factors distinguishing not only hungry from nonhungry families but also (among the hungry) adult from child hunger to better understand why some poor families experience adult or child hunger, whereas others do not.
