| Project: Integrated Study of School Meal Costs and Outcomes: A Design, Cost, and Feasibility Plan |
| Award Year: 2002 |
| Amount of award, fiscal 2002: $560,592.00 |
| Institution: Abt Associates |
| Principal Investigator: Christopher Logan |
| Status: Completed |
| Detailed Objective: This project will design a study of USDA school meal programs to jointly examine meal costs and nutrition. It will develop, test, and cost-out study procedures and analyze alternative designs. USDA has previously fielded studies of school meal outcomes and costs, but has never collected these data as part of a unified design and sampling plan, allowing the information to be combined to fully answer questions of compelling policy interest. An integrated study would allow an unprecedented level of analysis of the relationship of key operating characteristics, costs, and outcomes-with outcomes including both quality of meals offered and student participation and consumption. As a first step to developing an integrated study, the USDA-Economic Research Service has contracted with Abt Associates Inc. and Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. to design an integrated study of USDA school meal programs and to assess the cost and feasibility of such a study. |
| Topic: Data Collection and Methodology, School Lunch and Breakfast |
Output:
Guthrie, J. Food Assistance Research Brief--Do Healthy School Meals Cost More?, Food Assistance and Nutrition Research Report No. 34-6, USDA, ERS, July 2003.
Logan, C., A. Gordon, F. Glantz, M. Battaglia, N. Burstein, M. Fox, L. Kalb, C. Nagatoshi, L. Page, and K. Srinath. Integrated Study of School Meal Costs and Outcomes: Design, Cost, and Feasibility Plan, Contractor and Cooperator Report No. 77, September 2012. |