Differences in the acceptance of wife abuse among ethnic minority Garo and Santal and mainstream Bengali communities in rural Bangladesh

Rabiul Karim; Tanzima Zohra Habib; Sadequl Arefin; Hafijur Rahman; Suchona Rahman; Katarina Swahnberg

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0236733

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMarch 18, 2020
29 Apr 2020 Decision Letter - Andrew R. Dalby, Editor PONE-D-20-07653 Is Wife Abuse Accepted in Matrilocal Communities? A Cross-ethnic Study in Rural Bangladesh PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Karim, 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. Reviewer one in particular raises serious concerns about the validity of your approach. It is important to report the results in a statistically sound manner and this means with standard errors and confidence intervals for the marginals. I need you to give a robust response to the criticism about your not using the demographic norms established in the existing literature otherwise it is likely that the paper will be rejected. 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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: No Reviewer #2: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No 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: No 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: No Reviewer #2: No ****** 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 paper uses data from a purposively selected six villages located in northern Bangladesh to study differences in (i) ethnic characteristics of wives and (ii) attitudinal acceptance of wives abuse, more generally the domestic violence against themselves, by keeping both the research question and econometric specifications unstated. The authors collectively decided not to connect to any of the strands in the literature, -on the effects of historical social norms on present day economic outcomes- especially the glaring one (Alesina, Alberto, Benedetta Brioschi, and Eliana La Ferrara. “Violence Against Women: A Cross-cultural Analysis for Africa”). Without reckoning the detailed ethnography available in Murdock's (1967) Ethnographic Atlas, where more than 95 social norms are coded for both the communities the authors purposively chose to study (The Garos and The Santhals). It is widely recognized in the literature that the post-marital residence norms are not practiced in isolation, but concurrently with several other norms. In the limitation about the external validity of the seemingly non-causal (perhaps spurious) correlations, even without reporting the marginal effects and their corresponding standard errors is not a tenable academic practice, the authors admittedly accept the limited sample size. This could be avoided using several rounds of nationally-representative samples from Demographic and Health Survey data for Bangladesh, which covers the attitudinal measures towards wives acceptance of abuse. Much greater variations in ethnicity can be achieved if geographic data is exploited and obviously the relevant the literature on how to identify ethnicity with the spatial information and census data needs to be acknowledged if the methods are adopted. Reviewer #2: The study is about a very interesting topic in an understudied context. The article provides significant contribution on gender based violence. The text is clear and understandable enough. Before publication, the following should be considered: I. Abstract: Needs to strengthened the on key findings of the research and no clearly policy relevance recommendations II. Introduction: The introduction has well written about the contexts. However, lacks some depth about the different literatures in other countries and the extent of the situation. III. Methodology: How the sample 331 calculated? What is the scientific ground in selecting the sample size? How about the tools for measurement- do you tested the tool or are using the standard measurement tool ? Ethics section not compreleted “The study was conducted under the approval of Faculty Review Committee at …………………….” IV. Results and discussion I would suggest you to avoid repetitions, either put in text, tables or figures. Some results are also repeated in discussion. V. Conclusion and recommendations: Authors did not show the relevance and policy implication of this study. I could not see a concrete recommendation for decision makers and planners. ****** 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: Sumantra Pal 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.0236733.r001
Revision 1
16 Jun 2020 Author Response We have addressed all the comments and suggestions as follows (also in the attached file response to the reviewers): Reviewer #1: 1) We reviewed the above-mentioned literatures as well as other studies including another multi-country study based on the DHS dataset from 49 countries. Thanks for suggesting other useful literatures. We may now say that we have connected to the strands in the literature and further justified the importance of our current study (see lines: 87-108) 2) We changed our main focus from post-marital residence norms to the gender norms of the three ethnic communities. The title of the paper is changed (line. 4). We further elaborated how these three ethnic communities are socio-culturally different from each other. The discussion includes their post-marital residence norms, line of descent adopted by the children, inheritance of property to the children by gender, status of female mobility within the family (by veiled seclusion, many women have restricted mobility in to public spheres), women’s participation in economic activities, and women’s status within the family as to their ability to make family decisions. (See lines: 129-190) 3) We tried to avoid spurious relationship through a multivariate analysis, where we controlled the number of possible confounding factors such as respondents’ sex, age, education, occupation, family income, family structure, post-marital family residence, level of female mobility in the family, and level of women’s authority in the family. All these variables appeared to be associated with the independent variables in bivariate analysis. (See lines: 379-400, 411-417). 4) We used SPSS for the Poisson regression in order to estimate the difference in acceptance of wife abuse (AWA) among three ethnic communities. We reported the unstandardized regression coefficients and their corresponding standard errors. Although Average Marginal effects (AME) are simpler to interpret and understand and also are not affected by extreme values, unfortunately SPSS may not calculate AME. However, in Poisson regression, SPSS also produces similar standardized estimates exp(β), which also facilitate the interpretation of regression outcomes, a proportional (often expressed in percentages) effect of one unit change in the explanatory variable on the response variable. 5) Now we used data from our baseline survey. This includes 1,929 samples from 24 study villages. The findings of this dataset are consistent with the previous pilot study data. 6) The DHS survey only includes the women of reproductive age. However, our data include both male and female respondents. Based on our knowledge, we have not seen any previous DHS data-based studies that have controlled/reported on the ethnic variations of respondents in the Bangladeshi context. Ethnic minorities often reside in very remote villages (not always easy to reach) of Bangladesh. Without any special attention, any representative sample may exclude these people. More importantly, we included both the acceptance of physical abuse and the acceptance of emotional abuse, while DHS surveys only include the acceptance of wife beating. The DHS questionnaire uses 6 items, whereas we used 10 items. The DHS survey excluded very important events like where a person accepts wife abuse because of wife’s suspected extra-marital affairs. Previous studies indicate that the most common contextual reason for wife abuse in Bangladesh is related to women’s challenges of male authority, e.g., if wife argues with the husband, and on the suspected extra-marital relations. Therefore, we believe that our data are more comprehensive and relates to our study aim. Reviewer #2: 1) The abstract is revised accordingly. We added the policy recommendations. Thank you. 2) The literature review is now enriched with the examples of other countries. (please see lines: 55-58, 87-108). 3) We further revised our findings based on a new larger sample. We used data from the 1,929 sample (the baseline data from 24 villages). The previous version of the analysis was based on our pilot study, where we interviewed 383 respondents in 6 study villages. We revised as well as validated our study instruments during the pilot study. However, since we now have the baseline data from a larger sample on the same variables, we revised our analysis based on this new/large data set. The technique of minimum sample size determination as well as how we selected the samples are now elaborated (see lines: 228-240). We also further discussed the psychometric properties of our study measures including the sample of items, their internal consistency statistics, supporting literatures, calculation of scores, and their further categorization, etc.: acceptance of wife abuse (lines: 242-261), female mobility (lines: 294-303), and female authority (lines: 304-321). 4) We have further added to the ethical section now. Missing information has been included (lines: 351-371). 5) We tried to avoid repetitions. But some explanation of the table/figure data might be needed in the text. We tried to make them as few as possible. Thank you. 6) Discussions are further tightened (highlighted red) and a separate section on policy recommendation is added. (Lines: 532-546). Thank you so much. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: 1 Responses to reviewers (1) (1).docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236733.r002
14 Jul 2020 Decision Letter - Andrew R. Dalby, Editor Differences in the Acceptance of Wife Abuse among ethnic minority Garo and Santal and mainstream Bengali Communities in Rural Bangladesh PONE-D-20-07653R1 Dear Dr. Karim, 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, Andrew R. Dalby, PhD 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 ******** 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 ****** 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: (No Response) ****** 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 ****** 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: The authors has gone through all the feedbacks and substantial improvement was made through out the paper. The authors has made improvement from adjusting the background, methodology including the methodology section, and all other sections. Therefore, the manuscript can be accepted. ****** 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:** Muluken Dessalegn https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236733.r003
Formally Accepted
15 Jul 2020 Acceptance Letter - Andrew R. Dalby, Editor PONE-D-20-07653R1 Differences in the Acceptance of Wife Abuse among ethnic minority Garo and Santal and mainstream Bengali Communities in Rural Bangladesh Dear Dr. Karim: 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. Andrew R. Dalby Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236733.r004

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