PONE-D-20-25877

Predicting health behavior in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19):

Worldwide survey results from early March 2020

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Anaki,

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Amir H. Pakpour, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

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: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: 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

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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

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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: The study entitled “Predicting health behavior in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19): Worldwide survey results from early March 2020” examined a meaningful and timely issue in the current era. In addition, the study applied through statistical analysis to examine the preventive behaviors among different populations worldwide. The major strength also includes the theoretical background. Although the studied sample is not large if considering this is a worldwide recruitment, the study does have its merits and the logical flaw is smooth. Nevertheless, some improvements are needed for this work.

1. There are some papers using behavioral model to examine the preventive behaviors during the COVID-19 outbark period, the authors should cite these papers and have comparisons with these papers as they are relevant to this topic. Please see the following.

Chang, K.-C., Strong, C., Pakpour, A. H., Griffiths, M. D., & Lin, C.-Y. (2020). Factors related to preventive COVID-19 infection behaviors among people with mental illness. Journal of the Formosan Medical Association. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfma.2020.07.032

Lin, C.-Y., Imani, V., Majd, N. R., Ghasemi, Z., Griffiths, M. D., Hamilton, K., Hagger, M. S., & Pakpour, A. H. (2020). Using an Integrated Social Cognition Model to Predict COVID-19 Preventive Behaviours. British Journal of Health Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjhp.12465

Lin, C.-Y., Broström, A., Griffiths, M. D., & Pakpour, A. H. (2020). Investigating mediated effects of fear of COVID-19 and COVID-19 misunderstanding in the association between problematic social media use and distress/insomnia. Internet Interventions, 21, 100345. doi:10.1016/j.invent.2020.100345

Hagger, M. S., Smith, S. R., Keech, J. J., Moyers, S. A., & Hamilton, K. (2020). Predicting Social Distancing Intention and Behavior During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Integrated Social Cognition Model. Annals of Behavioral Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1093/abm/kaaa073

2. The authors should use the following references to portray the importance and conditions of preventive behaviors during COVID-19 outbreak. Specifically, Rieger in his two papers describes the intention to perform some preventive behaviors among Germany. Shrivastava and Shrivastava mentioned the shortage of personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 outbreak period. Therefore, with proper implementation of preventive behaviors, the problem of shortage in personal protective equipment may be resoled (i.e., the population may not be panic on the outbreak and not crazily purchase the personal protective equipment). Lin and Cheng discussed the effectiveness of successful government policy. Therefore, the findings presented in the current study may take reference from Lin and Cheng to activate governments in doing some reactions timely and immediately.

Rieger MO. Triggering altruism increases the willingness to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Soc Health Behav 2020;3:78-82

Rieger MO. To wear or not to wear? Factors influencing wearing face masks in Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic. Soc Health Behav 2020;3:50-4

Shrivastava SR, Shrivastava PS. COVID-19 pandemic: Responding to the challenge of global shortage of personal protective equipment. Soc Health Behav 2020;3:70-1

Lin MW, Cheng Y. Policy actions to alleviate psychosocial impacts of COVID-19 pandemic: Experiences from Taiwan. Soc Health Behav 2020;3:72-3

3. I wondering why the authors did not use any assessments that have been designed for COVID-19. Specifically, Ahorsu et al. have developed the Fear of COVID-19 Scale; Lee has developed the Coronavirus Anxiety Scale and Obsession with COVID-19 Scale; Taylor et al. have developed the COVID Stress Scales; Chang et al. have developed Preventive COVID-19 Infection Behaviors Scale. The authors should at least acknowledge this as one of the limitations. That is, mentioning in their Limitation section that these are the available instruments to assess COVID-19 impacts with proper citations.

4. As the sample is consisted of different ethnicity groups, I wonder whether the authors have all different languages used in the present study. Or, the authors only use English for all the measures? This information should be clearly indicated and if the latter is the truth, this should be acknowledged as one of the limitations.

5. In Figure 1, it is unclear what “Demographic 1” and “Demographic 2” indicate.

6. Please report all the p-values instead of using symbols to indicate whether the p-value is over 0.05, smaller 0.05, smaller 0.01, or smaller 0.001. For those p-values smaller than 0.001, the authors can use “<0.001” to present.

7. In Table 4, please provide the SE of the unstandardized coefficient. Also, please provide the R square and adjusted R square for each step.

8. I am not sure whether the authors have adjusted their type 1 error in all the t-tests and ANOVAs. It seems that they did a lot of inferential testing and the chance of type 1 error inflation is high.

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Reviewer #1: No

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Predicting health behavior in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19):

Worldwide survey results from early March 2020

PONE-D-20-25877R1

Dear Dr. Anaki,

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,

Amir H. Pakpour, 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

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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

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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 responded to all my prior comments and they are satisfactory. Therefore, I have no further comments on this work and would like to recommend publication.

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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