Level | Variables | Measurements |
---|---|---|
Individual-level variables | Age | The age of the mother/caregiver is categorized as 15–19, 20–34, and 35–49 [22] |
Sex | Sex of the household head as male or female | |
Education level | Educational attainment is categorized as uneducated, primary, secondary, and above educational status | |
Marital status | The marital status of the mothers is categorized as married or not married | |
Occupation of women | The occupations of women are categorized as working (professional/technical/managerial, clerical sales agricultural, employee, services, skilled manual unskilled manual, others) and not working | |
Family size | Categorized as 1–4, 5–10, and 11 and above [22] | |
Media exposure | A composite variable was obtained by combining whether a respondent reads newspaper/magazine, listens to the radio, and watches television with a value of “0” if women were not exposed to at least one of the three media, and “1” if a woman has access/exposure to at least one of the three media [23] | |
Wealth index | The datasets contained a wealth index that was created using principal components analysis coded as poorest, poorer, middle, richer, and richest in the DHS data set. For this study, we recorded it in three categories poorer (including poorer and poorest), middle and richer (includes richer and richest) [22] | |
Sex of the child | The sex of the child is categorized as male or female | |
Age of the child | The age of the child is categorized as 24–35, 36–47, and 48–59 months | |
Vitamin A | Vitamin A in the last 6 months, categorized as yes or no | |
Diarrhea | Diarrhea in 2 weeks, categorized as yes or no | |
Community-level variables | Residency | Urban or rural based on where the household lives |
Region in SSA | The region in sub-Saharan African region is categorized as Eastern Africa, Central Africa, Western Africa, and Southern Africa | |
Countries income level | The country’s income status was categorized as low income, lower middle income, and upper-middle income country based on the World Bank List of Economies classification since 2019 [24]. World Bank calculated country income based on Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, which categorized as low income $1025 or less; lower middle income, $1026–3995, upper-middle income $3996–12,375, and high income $12,375 or more [24] | |
DHS survey year | The survey year means the recent standard DHS data collection period of each country from 2010 to 2020. Categorized as DHS year 2010–2012, 2013–2015, and 2016–2020 |