Sociological dimensions of marital satisfaction in Romania

Delia Nadolu; Remus Runcan; Aurel Bahnaru

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0237923

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionFebruary 1, 2020
4 May 2020 Decision Letter - Petri Böckerman, Editor PONE-D-20-02203 SOCIOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF MARITAL SATISFACTION IN ROMANIA PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Delia, 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. The revised version should address all the comments in the reports. We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Jun 18 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, Petri Böckerman 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 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. 3. We note you have included a table to which you do not refer in the text of your manuscript. Please ensure that you refer to Tables 2 and 3 in your text; if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the Tables. Additional Editor Comments (if provided): [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: No ****** 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: No ****** 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: Being from the US, I would have liked more information on marriage in general in Romania. This would have been beneficial to having a better comprehension of the findings in the study. Reviewer #2: There are some things that should be done to make the data analysis clearer and more complete. 1. Sample size issues. Although there were 455 persons who responded to the survey as indicated in your methodology section, the Ns reported in the tables were substantially less. In Table 1 the highest N was 282, and in Table 3 it was only 83. There is no explanation of what became of the missing cases. This is a very high rate of missing data, and in such cases some way of handling this should be used, such as imputation, or a more complete discussion of the missing data and what bias it might yield should be included. 2. I have some concerns about the measure of liberalism of sexual attitudes scale. These seem to primarily to refer to views on premarital sex, but little is said about the relationship to marital sexual attitudes. As the DAS has items related to sexual satisfaction in the relationship, perhaps some additional analysis of how this relates to sexual attitudes scale would be useful. 3. Correlations of your measures with some respondent characteristics would help put the findings in context. What are the differences reported by males and females? Perhaps some differences by age and length of the relationship should also be reported here. 4. I can't see in the material I received that you will be providing access to the data set, at least the individual cases and responses of the respondents on the variables you used in this paper. This would be necessary for other researchers to explore the findings more completely using multivariate models. ****** 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: Dr. Donna Miller Reviewer #2: Yes: David R. Johnson [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.0237923.r001
Revision 1
15 May 2020 Author Response 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 We have made the update of the manuscript format (first page, abstract and level 1 heading). 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. We have added the Romanian copy of the questionnaire (the English version was already included). 3. We note you have included a table to which you do not refer in the text of your manuscript. Please ensure that you refer to Tables 2 and 3 in your text; if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the Tables. We have corrected these aspects. 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: No ________________________________________ 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No We will upload the database with English labels. ________________________________________ 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ________________________________________ 5. Review Comments to the Author Reviewer #1: Being from the US, I would have liked more information on marriage in general in Romania. This would have been beneficial to having a better comprehension of the findings in the study. In response to Reviewer 1’s request for more information on marriage in Romania we have added a chart showing statistical trends. To give wider context this is supplemented by data from other European countries. A comment on the likely reasons for the patterns shown has also been made. Reviewer #2: There are some things that should be done to make the data analysis clearer and more complete. 1. Sample size issues. Although there were 455 persons who responded to the survey as indicated in your methodology section, the Ns reported in the tables were substantially less. In Table 1 the highest N was 282, and in Table 3 it was only 83. There is no explanation of what became of the missing cases. This is a very high rate of missing data, and in such cases some way of handling this should be used, such as imputation, or a more complete discussion of the missing data and what bias it might yield should be included. The sample size issues in the data analysis arise from the composite definition of the factors analysed and the rate of participant response to specific component items in the questionnaire. This is now explained in the text of the paper. The point about potential bias has been addressed in the additional paragraph that reads as follows: This restriction of usefulness in our available dataset does imply some degree of limitation on the robustness of any correlations that we detected, and this consideration may be felt to apply even more to the DAS and complex factor correlations presented later. However, while maintaining a measure of caution, although we cannot claim this subset of the data fully represented our larger original sample, the surviving positive correlations remain statistically significant findings. It is arguable that, in the absence of any bias arising from the incompleteness of the responses, those relationships would have emerged more clearly than they did from a restricted sample. 2. I have some concerns about the measure of liberalism of sexual attitudes scale. These seem to primarily to refer to views on premarital sex, but little is said about the relationship to marital sexual attitudes. Little has been said about the relationship between liberalism of sexual attitude and marital sexual attitude because, for reasons now more explicitly explained, this dimension was not explored in the questionnaire administered. As the DAS has items related to sexual satisfaction in the relationship, perhaps some additional analysis of how this relates to sexual attitudes scale would be useful. In response some further results of statistical analysis have been presented (pag 12). In the sense that they are negative results (no significant differences found) we are not clear how much they really add, and they would not conventionally be reported. But if they are felt to give helpful clarification we are happy to include them. 3. Correlations of your measures with some respondent characteristics would help put the findings in context. What are the differences reported by males and females? Perhaps some differences by age and length of the relationship should also be reported here. Thank you very much for this recommendation. We have included an analysis of these aspects on pp 12-13. 4. I can't see in the material I received that you will be providing access to the data set, at least the individual cases and responses of the respondents on the variables you used in this paper. This would be necessary for other researchers to explore the findings more completely using multivariate models. We have prepared the database with English labels and we will upload this to the system for full free access. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Rebuttal Letter.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237923.r002
16 Jun 2020 Decision Letter - Petri Böckerman, Editor PONE-D-20-02203R1 SOCIOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF MARITAL SATISFACTION IN ROMANIA PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Delia, 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. The revised version should take into account all remaining comments. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 31 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're 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. 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). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Petri Böckerman Academic Editor PLOS ONE [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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: (No Response) ******** 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: Partly ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #2: No ****** 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 ****** 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: There are still two things you need to do to make this an acceptable manuscript. 1. You only partly dealt with the missing data problem. Although using a missing data strategy such as multiple imputation would be most preferable and conform to the standard way in the social sciences to handle the high level of missing data in your survey, an acceptable alternative is to add a information on what items are leading to the most missing data. Do all items have about the same level of missing data on the DAS, or do a few contribute the most? It would not take much space to discuss present this and may help the reader understand the limits of the analyses with small sample sizes due to casewise deletion int statistical analyses. 2. Making the data available in English as well is very helpful. The only problem I see is that the items determining the gender and age of the respondent are not included in your list. They should be include because they would be very important for researchers wanting to use your date, and it is fair that they be included as you did use there variables in some of your analyses. ****** 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: David R. Johnson [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.] 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 PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237923.r003
Revision 2
7 Jul 2020 Author Response 1. You only partly dealt with the missing data problem. Although using a missing data strategy such as multiple imputation would be most preferable and conform to the standard way in the social sciences to handle the high level of missing data in your survey, an acceptable alternative is to add a information on what items are leading to the most missing data. Indeed, the analysis of the missing data is a very useful source of additional information; thank you very much for the recommendation about multiple imputation. In our database, most of the questions with missing data relate to items that belong to the factual area (the length of previous relationships, some details of the couple’s life and so on), and any estimation of missing responses, or a weighting of the answers, could have skewed the final results due to the small size of the sub-sample. We have included in the article a short explanation about the source of the missing data for building the composite variables. Do all items have about the same level of missing data on the DAS, or do a few contribute the most? It would not take much space to discuss present this and may help the reader understand the limits of the analyses with small sample sizes due to casewise deletion int statistical analyses. Indeed, the DAS components have up to 82 missing item responses, mostly from the questionnaire returns of young people lacking significant dyadic experience, but also from people who had completed only the first part of the questionnaire. The two items in the DAS with the highest levels of missing responses were I30 Not showing love (119 missing) and I29 Being too tired for sex (108 missing). Both of these are very personal questions and they were also at the very end of the questionnaire. We have now included in the paper a short explanation of these features. 2. Making the data available in English as well is very helpful. The only problem I see is that the items determining the gender and age of the respondent are not included in your list. They should be include because they would be very important for researchers wanting to use your date, and it is fair that they be included as you did use there variables in some of your analyses. This is true and it was an error; we have uploaded an extended updated version of the database (in the first version of the article the analysis did not include age and gender). 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 PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. We have uploaded the figure files into the PACE system. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Rebuttal Letter 2nd round.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237923.r004
6 Aug 2020 Decision Letter - Petri Böckerman, Editor SOCIOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF MARITAL SATISFACTION IN ROMANIA PONE-D-20-02203R2 Dear Dr. Delia, 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, Petri Böckerman 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: 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 #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: (No Response) ****** 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:** David R. Johnson https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237923.r005
Formally Accepted
10 Aug 2020 Acceptance Letter - Petri Böckerman, Editor PONE-D-20-02203R2 Sociological dimensions of marital satisfaction in Romania Dear Dr. Nadolu: 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 Professor Petri Böckerman Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237923.r006

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