Food aid in four European countries: Assessing the price and content of charitable food aid packages

Description
The dataset is the result of a study on the content and monetary value of food aid packages distributed by local food aid organisations in four European cities: Antwerp, Barcelona, Budapest and Helsinki. Concretely, three food aid organisations per city, who fulfilled the inclusion criteria of the study, were randomly selected. In each organisation, two types of data were collected: 1) a structured interview with the head or a well-informed volunteer, and 2) four visits in which the content of the food aid packages was registered by a participating researcher. After this, food basket data was used to monetize the food aid products, and where necessary this was supplemented by available online pricing data of supermarkets in the four countries. The interviews were conducted at the location of the organisations and a few organisations also provided some of the information via e-mail or telephone. Although the questions were objective/factual about the history and functioning of the organisations only, some of the answers contain estimations of the interviewee in case when no objective information or data was available. The interview questions were set up in English and discussed with the involved researchers, but the questions were translated and the interviews were conducted in respectively Dutch, Hungarian, Finnish and Spanish. For analysis, the interview answers back to English. The registration of the content of the food aid packages included writing down relevant information about that product (such as volume, expiration date etc.) and to whom the product was given. The researchers collected this information in a harmonised way by making use of a uniformly constructed Microsoft Excel template.

Personal data yes/no
no

Type(s) of data and data format
Interview, content and prices of food aid packages data, 13 excel files

Temporal and special coverage
The data was collected between February 2022 and May 2022, in Antwerp (Belgium), Barcelona (Spain), Budapest (Hungary) and Helsinki (Finland).

Language of files
English

Subject
Food aid in 4 European countries, food aid packages, interview data

Audience
Social Sciences

Rightsholder
University of Antwerp, Karen Hermans, phd student, ORCID 0000-0001-9192-2948

Access rights
Restricted access: users may view and download the data by sending an e-mail to [e-mail] and specifying the purpose of the data use and how the data will be used. If the data is to be used for scientific purposes and the data is necessary or useful to reach the objectives, access will be granted.