Household wealth quintiles: With regard to wealth quintiles of households, limited study resources did not permit the collection of detailed data on household income and household consumption. Therefore, the study used a simple household asset-based wealth index to measure household wealth relative to others in the study, and to examine a relationship with anaemia following the method suggested by Wagstaff and Watanabe19. A list of common household assets was included in the survey questionnaire.
However, those used in generating the wealth quintiles were: bicycle, motorcycle, radio and telephone which were owned by at least 10% of the households. Each asset was assigned a score of '1' or '0’ depending on whether the household possessed that asset or not, respectively. A composite
household score was then created by summing up all the individual scores. Households were then ranked and divided into quintiles, with the lowest 20% as the lowest wealth quintile and the highest 20% as the highest quintile. Due to the limited number of household assets and housing characteristics used, the wealth quintiles in this study were used as a proxy indicator of household wealth.