PONE-D-19-21718

The promise of open survey questions - The validation of text-based job satisfaction measures

PLOS ONE

Dear Mr. Wijngaards,

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Irena Spasić

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

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2. Please include additional information regarding the survey or questionnaire used in the study and ensure that you have provided sufficient details that others could replicate the analyses. For instance, if you developed a questionnaire as part of this study and it is not under a copyright more restrictive than CC-BY, please include a copy, in both the original language and English, as Supporting Information

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

The related work on the use of text mining for survey data mining needs to be expanded. The following references need to be included:

Li, Hang, and Kenji Yamanishi. "Mining from open answers in questionnaire data." Proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining. ACM, 2001. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=502512.502579 also available in a journal at DOI: 10.1109/MIS.2002.1039833

Spasić, Irena, David Owen, Andrew Smith, and Kate Button. "Closing in on open–ended patient questionnaires with text mining." In Proceedings of the UK Healthcare Text Analytics Conference (HealTAC), Manchester, UK. 2018. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/109733/

Moreo, Alejandro, Andrea Esuli, and Fabrizio Sebastiani. "Building automated survey coders via interactive machine learning." International Journal of Market Research, 2019. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1470785318824244

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This article reports a study that compares measures of job satisfaction based on different methods of analysis of open questions and closed questions. The paper largely focuses on the nature of the methods and presents little evidence showing how the two approaches improve our understanding of the area. Construct validity would have been desirable, covering not just measurement of job satisfaction but job characteristics that influence it, and the outcomes following changes in satisfaction.

Reviewer #2: This paper presents a comparison of the reliability and validity of computer-aided text analysis techniques, comparing multiple forms of error associated with each, and examining their convergence with a closed-question concerned with job satisfaction. In addition to being innovative, it is an interesting and well-written paper that presents much new information that is quite useful. The fact that it is hypothesis-driven makes it, to me, even a superior effort. I thus really only have a few comments that I would ask the authors to address:

• Wondering if any respondent characteristics might be associated with the reliability or validity of the various approaches examined? For example, might the open-ended responses of older persons or less-educated persons be less reliable and/or valid? The data would seem to be available to investigate this.

• On page 15 of 35, a comparison of number of words per response at wave 1 vs. wave 2 is presented. More useful, though, might be a comparison of wave 1-wave 2 responses for those who completed both waves.

• There are several typos throughout the paper that will need to be corrected.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Timothy P Johnson

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Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

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Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

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Reviewer #2: Yes

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The promise of open survey questions - The validation of text-based job satisfaction measures

PONE-D-19-21718R1

Dear Dr. Wijngaards,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it complies with all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you will receive an e-mail containing information on the amendments required prior to publication. When all required modifications have been addressed, you will receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will proceed to our production department and be scheduled for publication.

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With kind regards,

Irena Spasić

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #2: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #2: thank you for this revised version. good work and appreciated reading it again. no further comments on this strong paper.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #2: Yes: Timothy P Johnson