Ethics approval
Our study did not require an ethical board approval because we used
publicly available anonymized data for analyses. The dataset used in
this study meet the definition of National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Exempt Human Subjects Research under the following exemption criteria:
“Exemption 4: involves the collection/study of data or specimens if
publicly available, or recorded such that subjects cannot be
identified”. The original survey protocol was approved by the
institutional review boards of International Institute for Population
Sciences (IIPS) and ICF. The survey complied with the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services regulations for the protection of human
subjects (45 CFR 46).