PONE-D-20-00802

Isn’t high school bad enough already? Investigating the rates and correlates of gender harassment and institutional betrayal in high school

PLOS ONE

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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

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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

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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

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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: Thank you for the opportunity to review this interesting article. It reports on the rates of gender harassment and institutional betrayal in high school and their association with traumatic symptoms later on in college. The study also looks at the moderating effect of institutional betrayal on the association between gender harassment and traumatic symptoms.

I believe this is a well-written and strong piece of research that contributes to a relevant and understudied field. While the study has some important limitations, the authors identify and discuss them appropriately. I, therefore, recommend accepting this manuscript once the authors have addressed the following issues:

Title: I believe the authors should include the outcome of the study (i.e. traumatic symptoms) in the title, to summarize the focus of the article more explicitly.

HLM: The authors need to provide more information regarding the hierarchical linear models (HLM) fitted. More specifically, the nested structure of the data that warrants the use of this modeling approach is not clearly explained (e.g. is it students nested within high schools, students nested within undergraduate courses).

The specification of the models should also be explained more clearly: How many levels are considered in the model? Which levels? What type of HLM (e.g. a random intercept model) is used? And, what are their distributional assumptions?

I suggest to provide the corresponding equations.

Other goodness of fit indicators that are commonly used in HLM could also be reported.

Also, Table 3 should show the results from the random part on the models.

The R package used to fit HLM was not reported either. I recommend reviewing one of the following HLM textbooks for the standard of reporting HLM results:

Hox, J. (2002). Multilevel analysis. Techniques and applications. Mahwah, NJ.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Snijders, T. A. B., & Bosker, R. (2004). Multilevel analysis: an introduction to basic and advanced multilevel modeling. London: Sage.

Raudenbush, S. W. & Bryk, A. S. (2002). Hierarchical Linear Models: Applications and Data Analysis Methods.

Finch, W. H. et al. (2017). Multilevel Modeling Using R.

Ethics: While I understand that participants were not informed about the content of the study to avoid biased self-selection and that the study was approved by their institutional ethics’ committee, I believe it would be important to reflect on and discuss the inclusion of trigger warnings in future research and the risks of double victimization.

Results: I believe that the sections Correlational results and Simple regression models are somewhat redundant as they both report on bivariate associations. The authors should focus more on reporting the HLM results.

In pages 7-8, the authors state "Rather than reporting on experiences in the workplace, participants were instructed to report on experiences of gender harassing behaviors during high school by anyone associated with their high school, including classmates, coaches, teachers, school staff, and administrators." Should it also say "and themselves"?

In page 9, it says "All items were summed to create a total composite IBQ score ranging from 0 to 36, where higher scores represent more frequent institutional betrayal." If this was the case and there were missing data in some of the IBQ items, those cases would obtain lower scores. I believe averaging scores would be a better approach.

As the authors suggest, the items of GEQ questionnaire differs somewhat by gender. I would suggest running reliability analysis separately to check that the internal consistency is similar among groups.

Also, considering that some of the scales used were modified from their original versions and that they now refer to a different setting (high school instead of work place for GEQ), I would suggest running factor analysis and reporting on the factor loadings of the items in an appendix.

Reviewer #2: This paper investigates an important topic. It is a competently conducted piece of research, with a large sample, and the writing is of exemplary clarity.

The findings serve to confirm existing views, rather than providing any great new insight. They replicate three previous findings, and bolster two existing measures. Beyond this, they reach a conclusion that might also be arrived at by informal observation, common sense, and a minimum of ethical awareness: that gender harassment is endemic, and that institutions should do their best to mitigate the harm which it causes. However, replication is a useful process, and the confirmation of an understanding which might appear obvious offers a valuable riposte to those who for personal or ideological reasons would like to minimise the significance of gender harassment. Consequently I believe that the paper is worthy of publication.

I would have liked to have seen a deeper consideration of the relationship between adolescents and high schools. The concept of institutional betrayal has political implications, in as much as it makes the case, or assumes, that it is the role of the institution to intervene in social interactions which are often not illegal, and which do not threaten in an immediate way the viability of the institution. This position has much to recommend it, but it is not universally held, nor are its limits uncontested. Indeed, I would argue that adolescents who suffer harassment are caught up a complex web of action and reaction involving both the defence of and resistance to a dominant gender discourse, and the actions of institutions seeking to navigate a path within this contested domain. It is the complexity of these interactions which lead to the stability of harassment, and to a tendency to institutional paralysis. Within this context, it may be that harassed individuals have very low expectations of the ability of the institution to act to protect them, perhaps with good reason, or they may never even have considered if it is the job of the institution to carry out this function. If so, this could perhaps be of relevance to your second hypothesis, as institutional betrayal may be accepted as the norm. I would be interested to see how your line of research could start to shed light on the wide range of social structures and interpersonal interactions which I believe lie behind institutional betrayal.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Isn’t high school bad enough already? Rates of gender harassment and institutional betrayal in high school and their association with trauma-related symptoms

PONE-D-20-00802R1

Dear Dr. Lind,

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.

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Kind regards,

Juan Cristobal Castro-Alonso, Ph.D.

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 #1: 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 #1: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: 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 #1: Yes

**********

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 #1: 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 #1: The authors have carefully considered and incorporated the comments made in the first revision. I, therefore, recommend publication of the article. It was a pleasure reading your manuscript.

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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 #1: No