The Household Water Insecurity Experiences (HWISE) Scale Development Project was a multi-sited research effort designed to develop and validate a scale for comparably measuring household water insecurity – the inability to reliably access sufficient water for basic domestic needs – across diverse social, cultural, and ecological contexts (https://www.wisescales.org). Between 2017 and 2018, cross-sectional surveys were implemented in multiple low- and middle-income country settings that were purposively selected to capture variation in geography, climate, urbanicity, water infrastructure, and types of water-related challenges, including scarcity, intermittency, flooding, and poor water quality. At each study site, adult respondents who identified themselves as knowledgeable about household water acquisition and use completed a structured survey administered by trained local enumerators in participants’ preferred languages. The core component of the survey consisted of items assessing the frequency of household water insecurity experiences over the prior four weeks. Additional survey modules collected information on household sociodemographic characteristics, water sources and acquisition practices, water storage and use, and related conditions, including household food insecurity and perceived stress. During the course of data collection, participant responses and cognitive interviews informed revisions to some experiential survey items, resulting in two versions of the instrument, referred to as HWISE 1.0 and HWISE 2.0 implementation sites. Most experiential items are comparable across these versions; however, HWISE 2.0 sites included an additional item related to shame that was not administered in HWISE 1.0 sites but was subsequently retained in the finalized scale. The data deposited here include aggregated survey data from a subset of participating study sites, including 21 of the 28 sites included in the final scale development paper, as well as Bangladesh, a site that participated in the project but contributed data after completion of the primary scale validation analyses. Aggregated measures include three sociodemographic characteristics – participant gender, participant age, and household size – and responses to the experiential water insecurity items that comprise the finalized 12-item HWISE Scale.

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