is provided by data from the FSP participants who were interviewed in person. Each respondent was asked to supply the name and address of the supermarket nearest his or her home. Where sufficient data were provided, the geographical coordinates of the nearest supermarket were geocoded and the distance to the respondent’s home was estimated. There are, however, a number of limitations to these data. In particular, only about 60 percent of the relevant observations could be coded, and there is some evidence that coding success was correlated with proximity between home and store. (See Appendix E.) Nevertheless, the coded distance data, as shown in the bottom of Table IV.1, provide additional insight into these households’ access to food shopping activities. In assessing these data, it should be noted that the calculated distances are straight-line distances from the respondents’ homes to the stores. They are thus closely related to, but not directly comparable to, the travel distances reported by the respondents in describing their shopping trips. More than half (54 percent) of the households for which data could be coded lived within one mile of a supermarket. Only about 11 percent lived four miles or more. If the subsample of observations that could be coded is typical, most FSP participants live quite close to a supermarket. The data on the distance to the nearest store, combined with data on the distance that respondents travel to shop, suggest that a substantial number of food stamp households choose to shop at a store other than the nearest one. The percentage of FSP participant households for which the nearest store is greater than four miles was 11, which is much lower than the 34 percent who reported actually traveling four miles or more. As already noted, these data should be treated with some caution, because there is evidence that the success in coding may have biased the coded sample in the direction of having too many “close” stores and not enough “far” stores and because the distances to the nearest stores are computed as straight-line distances rather than travel distances. However, as discussed in Appendix E, even when similar data are compared (geocoded data for both
47