Table 1 Description of exposure variables

Age Group

Re-coded into four categories of 15–19 coded as 1, 20–29 coded as 2, 30–39 coded as 3 and 40–49 coded as 4.

Birth Order

Re–coded into four categories: 1 for having first order birth, 2 for having second order birth, 3 for having third order birth, and 4 for having birth order four and above.

Ethnic Origin

Re-coded in four major ethnic groups: 4 for being Oromo, 3 for being Tigre, 2 for being Amhara and 1 for being other Ethiopian ethnic group categories as most of the other ethnic groups in this category are small in number.

Religion

Re-coded 1 for being Orthodox, 2 for being Muslim and 3 for being in other religious category (combining Protestant, Catholic, traditional and the other religious categories as most women in this category are small in number).

Maternal Education

Re-coded as no education, primary education and secondary or higher combining the secondary and higher education categories together.

Maternal Occupation

Re-coded as 1 for not working (combining it with domestic household work category), 2 for sales and services (combining sales, services and professional/technical/managerial categories), 3 for skilled manual, 4 for unskilled manual and agricultural laborers (combining unskilled manual categories, agricultural employee and self-employed categories).

Media Access

A composite index combining whether respondents read a newspaper or magazine, listen to radio and watch TV. Coded 1 for having no access to media,2 for having medium access to media (at least one) and 3 for having high access to media with access to more than one media at least once a week.

Wealth Index

The datasets contained wealth index that had been created using principal components analysis, coded 1 as poorest, 2 as poorer, 3 as middle, 4 as richer and 5 as richest.

Urban-rural residence

The variable place of residence in the dataset was retained without change and was re-coded 1 as rural and 2 urban.