Teen food insecurity in a central Texas city: Teen perspectives using photovoice

ABSTRACT

Teen food insecurity is gaining attention as a social problem in the United States. This study seeks to understand the barriers to teen food security, coping strategies used to address food insecurity, related impacts, and solutions proposed by teens. Photovoice and a focus group were the primary methods used to enable teens to express their experiences visually and aurally. Compared to results from other teen food insecurity research, teens in this study reported social support strategies like reliance on family and community organizations and sabotaging strategies like begging and stealing food less often than sacrificing strategies such as working jobs to supplement the family’s food budget, giving money or food to family or friends, eating highly processed and inexpensive foods, or going without food. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of a teen-focused, trauma-informed, and healing-centered approach that recognizes teens’ underlying economic, social, and physiological needs during a crucial developmental phase of life.

KEYWORDS:

• Food insecurity
• teenagers
• adolescence
• healing-centered
• trauma-informed
• socioeconomic status
• photovoice

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Center for Public Justice for funding this research and for the guidance and support from Katie Thompson, the program director and editor of the Center for Public Justice’s Shared Justice Initiative and the Hatfield Prize. We also wish to thank the five teens who actively engaged in this research and the feedback from conference participants, anonymous reviewers, and Sara Prescott that helped us to refine this work. We appreciate the recognition for this research by Jeremy Everett and Baylor’s Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty as well as Baylor’s Undergraduate Research and Scholarly Achievement symposium committee. We would also like to thank Toni Fitzgerald for her editorial support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Center for Public Justice’s 2019 Hatfield Prize.