Title: Determinants of wife-beating acceptance among reproductive age women in Ethiopia:  A
multilevel analysis of 2016 Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey
Version: 2 Date: 30 Apr 2021
Reviewer:  Mohammed Feyisso Shaka
Reviewer's report:
Overall
The manuscript does have an important contribution to the scientific world with a good statistical
approach in synthesizing the findings but needs improvement.
The article needs extensive language revision
Title
• What is the importance and implication of “Why women accepting wife beating?” statement
in the title? Better to remove it.
• Remove the word “group” from the title. ‘Reproductive age women’ is enough
Abstract
• The background under your abstract including the objective of the study is all about the attitude
towards wife beating which is relatively different from your main title. Acceptability cannot be
simply measured by attitude. It might be one dimension.
• In the result part, rephrase the second statement under the result in a better and easily
understandable way. It might be better in this way “From community-level factors, living in
Somali [AOR=0.2 95% CI= (0.1, 0.3)], Addis Ababa [AOR= 0.3, 95%CI= (0.2, 0.5)] and Dire
Dawa [AOR= 0.5, 95% CI= (0.3, 0.7)]  were 80 %, 70% and 50% respectively less likely accept
wife-beating when compared to women who live in Tigray region. Also better to clearly interpret
the first statement to make it more understandable by readers out of the field. The third statement
also has a grammatical error and a poor way of using punctuation. You should also clearly state
the direction of association as clearly depicted by the OR.
•  In the conclusion, you should clearly state what those results actually imply than repeating
what you have stated in the result part.
Background
• Your background is relatively good. However, you gave less emphasis to your specific title
which is wife-beating. Particularly you gave undue emphasis to GBV and intimate partner
violence than wife-beating. You should explain about what you mean by wife-beating.
• Still, your objective is about attitude while your result on the abstract is all about the
acceptability of wife-beating.
• I am also do not agree with the phrase “…do not consider the effect of community-level
factors.” Most of the studies done on violence consider the community-level factors you used
except the region of residence. Also, there are other studies done using the previous EDHS
Methodology
• The way you measured the wife-beating is not clear. Please clearly put how wife-beating
was measured. It seems you are saying that “if women agree to the burning of food, she was
considered as having a positive attitude towards wife-beating”.
• Have you checked for Cronbach alpha value of the measuring tool for wife-beating
• In measuring the television and radio exposure, what is the difference between denominator
and numerator?
• How have you measured the wealth index? Please explain the methodology.
Result and discussion
• Needs extensive language revision
•   Please reduce the length of your tables. For instance table 1 was presented on 4 pages. You
can separate individual and community characteristics in different tables
• There are no Muslim followers but Islam followers. Correct the terminology in that way. In
the explanation for the association between religion and wife-beating, you said that Muslim
women were more likely to approve of wife-beating. But the explanation you put there is simply
for religiosity and cannot be the explanation for the Islamic religion.  Give any other possible
explanation for the reason why Muslim women were more likely to approve the wife-beating,
including any Islamic religious traditions, teachings, and doctrines that could make women
accept wife-beating. Unless otherwise, it could be due to chance.
• Line 310, the second statement is incomplete, and in the third statement word ‘rich’ is written
as “r3ich”
• Line 315, the exposed is written as espoused. There is so many such word error in the texts.
Line 316, ‘a research’ is written as “a search”