Increasing the willingness to participate in organ donation through humorous health communication: (Quasi-) experimental evidence

Cornelia Betsch; Nora K. Schmid-Küpke; Leonie Otten; Eckart von Hirschhausen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0241208

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJuly 7, 2020
23 Sep 2020 Decision Letter - Valerio Capraro, Editor PONE-D-20-21037 Increasing the Willingness to Participate in Organ Donation Through Humorous Health Communication: (Quasi-)Experimental Evidence PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Betsch, 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. Please submit your revised manuscript by Nov 07 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. 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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, Valerio Capraro Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments: I have now collected one review from one expert in the field. The review is extremely positive and suggests acceptance conditional to a minor revision. After reading the paper, I agree with the reviewer. Therefore, I would like to invite you to revise your work following their comments. I am looking forward for the final version. 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 [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 ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: 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 ****** 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 ****** 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 is a well planned, executed, and presented paper, examining the role of Entertainment education, and more specifically humour, in eliciting positive attitudes on knowledge, fear, attitudes, and behavioural intentions regarding organ donation. Specific strengths of the paper: 1) The methodology and design of the study is based on thorough systematic literature review of the field. 2) Considerable thought has been given to statistical power and sample size calculation for study 2 3) Appropriate use of statistical tests and relevant inferences drawn from the results Some minor suggestions are mentioned below: 1) Typographical error - Study 1, attitude and intentions section, 3rd paragraph......the line reads "intentions at r = .27 (p < 0.001)" 2) Study 1 and 2 included significantly different age groups of populations, and whether age has any correlations with perception of funniness of the treatments, and thereby an effect on attitude and intention changes, is something that may be touched upon in the discussion. 3) Although the authors have discussed the role of low statistical power in their non obtaining of a significant effect of humour on attitude, intention, knowledge in study 2 (general discussion paragraph 2), perhaps a word or two regarding the same in terms of a post-hoc power analysis with calculated effect sizes may be considered. ****** 6. 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Revision 1
9 Oct 2020 Author Response In addition to the three changes mentioned below we changed the OSF view only link to the full access link: https://osf.io/vkn4s. We further changed the formatting according to the PLOS ONE requirements. R1: 1) Typographical error - Study 1, attitude and intentions section, 3rd paragraph......the line reads "intentions at r = .27 (p < 0.001)" Response: We have changed the text into: “As the humor hypothesis proposed, attitudes and intentions at T2 were related to perceived funniness of the treatment (attitudes: r = .25 (p <.001; n=2,566); intentions: r =.27 (p <.001; n =1,827); note that this was assessed for the treatment group only as the treatment was evaluated which was absent in the control group).” R1: 2) Study 1 and 2 included significantly different age groups of populations, and whether age has any correlations with perception of funniness of the treatments, and thereby an effect on attitude and intention changes, is something that may be touched upon in the discussion. Response: Thank you for this suggestion. We explored the correlations as suggested. We added the results to the results section of Study 1: (p. 10): “Because of the different age groups in the sample, we checked whether age correlated with the perception of funniness in the treatment group. There was a significant correlation with a very small strength of association, r = .054, p = .006.” In the results section of Study 2 we added: “Further, participants’ age did not correlate with the perception of funniness of the treatments, r = -.022, p = .798.” As the correlation was very low and did not appear in the second study, we refrained from adding this to the discussion. R1: 3) Although the authors have discussed the role of low statistical power in their non obtaining of a significant effect of humour on attitude, intention, knowledge in study 2 (general discussion paragraph 2), perhaps a word or two regarding the same in terms of a post-hoc power analysis with calculated effect sizes may be considered. Response: Thank you for this suggestion. As it is suggested “explain how likely it was to observe a significant effect, given your sample, and given an expected or small effect size” instead of calculating post-hoc power analyses (http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2014/12/observed-power-and-what-to-do-if-your.html) we added: “With a smaller expected effect size of f = .10, the power analysis would have resulted in a sample size of N = 260 for 1-�= .95 (two groups between, three groups within).” https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241208.r002
12 Oct 2020 Decision Letter - Valerio Capraro, Editor Increasing the Willingness to Participate in Organ Donation Through Humorous Health Communication: (Quasi-)Experimental Evidence PONE-D-20-21037R1 Dear Dr. Betsch, 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, Valerio Capraro Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241208.r003
Formally Accepted
19 Oct 2020 Acceptance Letter - Valerio Capraro, Editor PONE-D-20-21037R1 Increasing the Willingness to Participate in Organ Donation Through Humorous Health Communication: (Quasi-)Experimental Evidence Dear Dr. Betsch: 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. Valerio Capraro Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241208.r004

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