Maternal, paternal, and other caregivers’ stimulation in low- and- middle-income countries

Jorge Cuartas; Joshua Jeong; Catalina Rey-Guerra; Dana Charles McCoy; Hirokazu Yoshikawa

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0236107

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionFebruary 20, 2020
22 Apr 2020 Decision Letter - Thach Duc Tran, Editor PONE-D-20-04986 Caregivers’ Cognitive and Socioemotional Stimulation in Low- and- Middle-Income Countries PLOS ONE Dear Mr. Cuartas, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Jun 06 2020 11:59PM. When you are ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where a protocol can be assigned its own identifier (DOI) such that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). This letter should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Manuscript'. Please note while forming your response, if your article is accepted, you may have the opportunity to make the peer review history publicly available. The record will include editor decision letters (with reviews) and your responses to reviewer comments. If eligible, we will contact you to opt in or out. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Thach Duc Tran, M.Sc., Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Please ensure that you include a title page within your main document. We do appreciate that you have a title page document uploaded as a separate file, however, as per our author guidelines (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-title-page) we do require this to be part of the manuscript file itself and not uploaded separately. Could you therefore please include the title page into the beginning of your manuscript file itself, listing all authors and affiliations. 3. Please also amend your manuscript to include your abstract after the title page. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions 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 #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. 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 #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. 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 #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 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: I congratulate the authors because this is a most needed area of study. I hope you will continue studying MICS and other demographic data. The following are three comments to your paper. I leave it up to you to consider them or not: 1) The socioemotional piece is missing in the Introduction (although is in the title). In future publications it would be important to define it properly explaining how it can be affected by the 6 MICS / DHS measures used in the study. 2) In future publications consider using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (this regression technique is important when groups within groups are studied). 3) Consider adding a few lines to you Conclusion. What you found has implications in the need of Parenting Programs worldwide. Parenting programs allow to bring children and caregivers together and work on socioemocional and cognitive stimulation. Please sell your findings!!!! Reviewer #2: This is a well-written manuscript addressing the caregivers’ cognitive and socioemotional stimulation in low- and middle-income countries using publicly available datasets from MICS and DHS. I have following suggestions for the author to further revise this manuscript before considering its publication in PLOS One. 1. The theoretical framework is not clear to support the work reported in this manuscript. Relevant work conducted in prior studies can be reviewed in a more systematic way. The research questions can be more specific and explicit. 2. More details of the Methods should be provided, including the source of the data (how many from MICS and how many from DHS, how to combine the datasets, which variable from which source), and the statistical methods used to address each of the research questions. 3. The discussion is general currently. Potential mechanism related to the findings for each research questions can be further discussed. ****** 6. 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 #1: Yes: Alfredo R. Tinajero, PhD Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files to be viewed.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email us at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236107.r001
Revision 1
19 May 2020 Author Response Editor Thank you very much for the opportunity to revise the manuscript. The Reviewers’ comments were very helpful, and we made several edits to our manuscript in response to each comment, as we describe below. Reviewer #1 1. I congratulate the authors because this is a most needed area of study. I hope you will continue studying MICS and other demographic data. The following are three comments to your paper. I leave it up to you to consider them or not We thank the Reviewer for the review and helpful feedback. We have made edits throughout the manuscript following the Reviewer’s suggestions. 2. The socioemotional piece is missing in the Introduction (although is in the title). In future publications it would be important to define it properly explaining how it can be affected by the 6 MICS / DHS measures used in the study. We agree with the Reviewer and have decided to expand our discussion on the importance of caregivers’ stimulation for both cognitive and socioemotional development in the specific context of low- and- middle-income countries in the Introduction. In particular, we provide expanded discussion of the type of socioemotional skills impacted by stimulation, with examples on pages 2-3 of how different activities captured in the MICS / DHS can promote cognitive and socioemotional skills. Moreover, we now mention empirical findings showing strong links between the six MICS / DHS activities assessed by the stimulation measure in our study and children’s cognitive and socioemotional development. 3. In future publications consider using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (this regression technique is important when groups within groups are studied). We thank the Reviewer for this suggestion. The current paper is merely descriptive and does not assess any statistical predictive association at the individual level or between a level-2 and level-1 variable as might be done in HLM (that is, associations calculated as correlations are solely at the country level, such as the association between HDI and proportion of children exposed to different levels of stimulation). To ensure that our country-level samples were each nationally representative, we employed country-specific sample weights, as is suggested when using the MICS and DHS. We agree that future studies with the MICS or DHS examining associations between the stimulation index and child outcomes or other variables could benefit from employing hierarchical linear models to account for the nesting of children and families within countries. 4. Consider adding a few lines to you Conclusion. What you found has implications in the need of Parenting Programs worldwide. Parenting programs allow to bring children and caregivers together and work on socioemocional and cognitive stimulation. Please sell your findings!!! We followed the Reviewer’s suggestion and included an additional paragraph at the end of the discussion section reviewing some programs that have tried to bring different caregivers together and discussing the importance of such kind of programs in LMICs. Please see pages 14-15. Reviewer #2 5. This is a well-written manuscript addressing the caregivers’ cognitive and socioemotional stimulation in low- and middle-income countries using publicly available datasets from MICS and DHS. I have following suggestions for the author to further revise this manuscript before considering its publication in PLOS One. We thank the Reviewer for the review and useful comment. We have made edits throughout the manuscript following the Reviewer’s suggestions. 6. The theoretical framework is not clear to support the work reported in this manuscript. Relevant work conducted in prior studies can be reviewed in a more systematic way. The research questions can be more specific and explicit. We thank the Reviewer for this important comment. We have now added more details to the introduction of the manuscript with regard to the theoretical framework. In particular, we included an additional paragraph discussing prior theories showing the importance of caregivers’ stimulation for young children’s development, including the bioecological model of development; relational developmental systems theory, and attachment theory. We have also included additional citations of prior work on pages 3-4. Finally, we have clarified the three research questions that we address in the study (see p. 5) following the Reviewer’s suggestion. 7. More details of the Methods should be provided, including the source of the data (how many from MICS and how many from DHS, how to combine the datasets, which variable from which source), and the statistical methods used to address each of the research questions. We have made edits in the manuscript and supplementary materials in response to this comment. First, we mention in the manuscript the number of countries that come from the MICS and from the DHS, as follows: “These data combined 54 MICS (rounds 4-6) and 8 DHS country surveys collected between 2010 and 2018.” Furthermore, we present details on each country’s sample characteristics in S1 Table (supplementary materials). Finally, we edited the methods section to (1) include more details on the statistical methods and (2) link each research question with the statistical methods used, as suggested by the Reviewer (see p. 7). Moreover, we clarified that both the MICS and DHS included the same set of questions about stimulation (see p. 6), in response to the Reviewers’ comment. 8. The discussion is general currently. Potential mechanism related to the findings for each research questions can be further discussed. We thank the Reviewer for this comment. We included additional details in the discussion speculating about potential mechanisms explaining our findings. We also mention that future studies should examine in detail the mechanisms underlying our results. Please see pages 11-14. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to reviewers comments.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236107.r002
30 Jun 2020 Decision Letter - Thach Duc Tran, Editor Maternal, Paternal, and other Caregivers’ Stimulation in Low- and- Middle-Income Countries PONE-D-20-04986R1 Dear Dr. Cuartas, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Thach Duc Tran, M.Sc., Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236107.r003
Formally Accepted
1 Jul 2020 Acceptance Letter - Thach Duc Tran, Editor PONE-D-20-04986R1 Maternal, Paternal, and other Caregivers’ Stimulation in Low- and- Middle-Income Countries Dear Dr. Cuartas: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Thach Duc Tran Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236107.r004

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .