Food Insecurity Among College Students with Disabilities During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Food Insecurity Among College Students with Disabilities During the COVID-19 Pandemic Krista M Soria (bio) and Vanessa Coca (bio) Over the last several years, scholars have drawn attention to the growing rates of food insecurity among college and university students in the US (Broton & Goldrick-Rab, 2018; The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice [The Hope Center], 2021). Food insecurity is a multifaceted concept commonly defined as the limited availability of nutritious foods, the uncertain ability to acquire nutritious foods, or the inability to acquire nutritious foods (Anderson, 1990). Food insecurity also constitutes interrupted eating patterns or a reduction in the quality of diet due to the lack of resources to access nutritious food (Coleman-Jensen et al., 2020). An estimated 40% of undergraduate students experience food insecurity (The Hope Center, 2021). Although research on food insecurity in college students is expanding, examinations into whether there are different rates of food insecurity by students' demographic characteristics have focused primarily on students' race/ethnicity, age, income or socioeconomic status, and sex or gender (The Hope Center, 2021; Morris et al., 2016; Wood & Harris, 2018). At present, researchers have not focused on food insecurity rates among college students with disabilities. The omission of food insecurity research on college students with disabilities is concerning due to the prevalence of students with disabilities in higher education—nearly one in five undergraduates has a disability (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2021). Due to many forms of oppression, including ableism, racism, classism, and more, students with disabilities encounter more barriers in higher education, leading to reduced degree completion rates (Lett et al., 2020; NCES, 2022). Food insecurity is a factor associated with lower degree completion rates among students and is one of many factors that could exacerbate the existing disparities in degree completion rates (Wolfson et al., 2021). The topic of food insecurity is even more important to examine during the initial semesters of the COVID-19 pandemic when college students experienced significant and sudden financial hardships (Soria et al., 2022; The Hope Center, 2021). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine whether college students with disabilities had significantly different odds of experiencing food insecurity compared to their peers when controlling for additional demographic variables and COVID-19 experiences. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK We used Glover and colleagues' (2020) conceptual framework for mitigating the equity harms of COVID-19. The model stipulated [End Page 102] that inequitable COVID-19 policies may have generated additional harms to individuals who were already marginalized, oppressed, and disenfranchised prior to the pandemic, including individuals with disabilities. Exacerbated food insecurity rates among marginalized groups (such as students with disabilities) during the pandemic may be a manifestation of pre-existing intersectional forms of oppression (i.e., ableism, racism) coupled with inequitable COVID-19-related policies. Glover et al. cited demographic variables associated with COVID-19 equity harms, including disability, employment, race/ethnicity, gender, and family education, and we used many of those demographic variables in our analysis. METHODOLOGY: INSTRUMENT, SAMPLE, MEASURES, AND ANALYSIS We used data from the 2020 #RealCollege Survey, which was administered to 1.84 million college students at 130 community and technical colleges and 72 four-year colleges in 42 states from September to November 2020. The response rate averaged 10.6% (N = 195,629), although only a smaller subset of 70,210 students who were also enrolled in spring 2020 answered the COVID-19-specific items (Table 1). The survey assessed students' food security using the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA, 2012) 18-item set of questions (full items and methodology for summing the scale are available online via The Hope Center, 2021). The scale had excellent reliability in this study (α = .924) and can be converted to a four-level measure of food security level (i.e., very low, low, marginal, or high; The Hope Center, 2021). However, we dichotomized the results to provide a snapshot of whether students experienced food insecurity (0 = student is food secure [marginal or high food security], 1 = student is food insecure [very low or low food security]). Students reported demographic characteristics, which we converted using effect coding except in the case of dichotomous variables (e.g., full...