The socio-demographic information of the study participants was sum-marized by mother’s age (1524, 2534, 3544, and 45+ years), family size (24, 57, 8 and above), head of household (male-headed or fe-male-headed), marital status (currently in a union, married/living togeth-er or single, divorced/widowed/separated), and current involvement in income-earning activity (yes or no). Child age was categorized into six age groups (05, 611, 1223, 2435, 3647, 4859 months) and sex (male or female).
Main explanatory variables
The highest completed grade/school year of the mother was recorded and the responses were categorized into never attended/not finished 1st grade, grade 14, grade 58, grade 912, and college-educated, consid-ering the Ethiopian educational system.
A relative measure for each household’s living standards, the wealth index, was computed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) (97). Households were then categorized into their respective wealth tertile or quintile. The household food insecurity access scale (HFIAS) was used to as-sess whether households had experienced any food insecurity condi-tions in the past 30 days. The household was then categorized as food secure, or mildly, moderately and severely food insecure, according to the severity (98).
Consumption of food in families and children was assessed using a 16-food-group reference, whereby the research assistants showed a photo gallery of common foods within each category. The food groups include cereals, white roots tubers, vitamin-A-rich vegetables, green leafy vegetables, other vegetables, vitamin-A-rich fruits, other fruits, organ meat, flesh meat, eggs, fish, legumes, nuts and seeds, dairy, oils and fats, sweets and spice condiments (99).
For children, the food groups were recategorized into 7food groups while the households were recategorized into 11food groups, mimicking a modified version of the women’s minimum diet diversity indicator (WDDI) (99), hereafter referred to as ‘family food’ group.
When form-ing these food groups, the research team used the WDDI because it con-siders micronutrient adequacy. Further, the team made modifications to split some of the groups in the WDDI considering the diet patterns of the study population.
For example, in Ethiopia, availability, as well as consumption of fish, is rare, while meat is a big part of the culture. Hence, the food group ‘meat and fish’ was split. Similarly, the food group ‘vitamin-A-rich fruits and vegetables’ was also split. The family food groups were used as a reference to measure per-ceived availability and affordability. To assess availability and afforda-bility, mothers were asked ‘Whether any of the foods shown in the pho-to were available on the market’ and/or ‘How often can your family afford to consume any of these foods?’ The responses were then cate-gorized as either available or not available, and affordable or not af-fordable, for each family food group.
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