Table 2 List of variables for the assessment of quality of ANC among pregnant women in Ethiopia

Age of the women in year

15–24, 25–34, and 35–49

Women educational level

No formal education, Primary education, and Secondary and higher education

Women occupation

Working, not working

Husband educational level

No formal education, Primary education, and Secondary education and higher

Wealth index

In the DHS data, wealth index is categorized into quintile as poorest, poorer, middle, richer, richest using principal component analysis. A high degree of variability in observation from the original DHS classification led to the re-categorization of wealth index scores into three categories: poor, middle, and rich, which was categorized by merging the poorest with the poorer and the richest with the richer for easier interpretation [36].

Heard family planning messages in the media

Ideal number of children

Coded “yes” if the women heard/read family planning messages either in newspaper, radio, or television for at least less than once a week, and “no” for otherwise.

< 4, ≥4

age at first cohabitation

< 18, ≥ 18

Number of living children

None, 1–2, ≥3

Ever had terminated pregnancy

Community level variables

Yes, No

Place of residence

Rural, Urban

Distance to the nearest health facility

Participants were asked if distance to the health facility is a problem to them or not. Their response was categorized as “Big problem”, “Not big problem” [36].

Survey year

2010–2013, 2014–2015, 2016–2018

community level education and community level media exposure

The aggregate community level independent variables (community-level education and community level media exposure) were constructed by aggregating individual-level characteristics at the community (cluster) level. These were categorized as high or low based on the distribution of the proportion values computed for each community after checking the distribution by using the histogram. The aggregate variables were not normally distributed and the median value (50%) was used as a cut-off point for the categorization of each community level variables. Finally, categorized as low if the proportion from a given community is < 50% and high if the proportion is ≥ 50%. All the independent variables were identified from reviewing different literatures [33, 37,38,39,40].