Peer Review History
Original SubmissionOctober 12, 2020 |
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PONE-D-20-32012 Exploring Barriers to the Adoption and Utilization of Improved Sanitation Facilities in rural Ethiopia: An Integrated Behavioral Model for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (IBM-WASH) Approach PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Tamene, 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 address the reviewers' suggestions for minor revisions, below. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 09 2021 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:
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, Susan Horton 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 2. Please provide additional information regarding the participant eligibility criteria for the two groups. 3. Thank you for stating the following in the Funding Statement section of your manuscript: "The research was performed as part of the employment of the authors at Wachemo University and Dilla University. Only the authors were involved in the manuscript writing, editing, approval, or decision to publish." We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. 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We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide. 5. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. [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: N/A Reviewer #2: N/A ********** 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: 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: This is a very solid paper, with clear methods and relevant results that provide great qualitative insights into understanding behavioral change in latrine-use within the context of a rural district in Ethiopia. A few comments I hope the authors will consider follow. In the introduction and then again in the conclusion, you state that – for example on pg 19 – “This study presents the barriers (perceived and actual) to the adoption and utilization of improved sanitation facilities which were not sufficiently addressed in the existing quantitative literature.” This critique of existing literature is a little misleading. First it aims only at quantitative literatures in the conclusion. Yet one can argue that it is not that existing literatures do not sufficiently address drivers or barriers to adoption as a whole, but that existing studies do not typically combine all dimensions of the analysis into one study – this is a methodological issue if any. In other words, quantitative studies may simply be choosing to understand the weight and scale of a particular vector or driver of behavioral change; as opposed to indicating that all other vectors are not important, they are testing a specific hypothesis about one vector. Your statements make it seem like all studies must study all aspects in one analysis, otherwise they are not useful. Is that really what you wish to say and what is the basis of such an evaluation? While I very much sympathize with your methodological approach, I fear that the paper here discounts too rapidly the contributions of other methods of analysis outside of IBM-WASH. If that is the point of the analysis and argument in this paper, then you should add more comparison of different studies and their methods, and a clear metric of evaluation of those studies. Alternatively, I’d recommend simply indicating that not many papers address all factors driving behavioral change, and that this type of analysis is critical to policy implementation of CLTSH given that behavioral change is recognized as reflecting upon several factors. It seems your discussion is really centered on latrine use, but the title and introduction of your article point to the wider portfolio of improved sanitation. I would suggest a correction to both the title of the piece, and a more specific concentration on latrine typologies, recommendations therein, and latrine use in the introduction, and perhaps reference to open defecation, given the connections therein. The drop from 80% in 2000 to 27% in 2015 in Ethiopia with regard to open defecation is a rather tremendous success story. How does Wonago district in the Southern Nations perform on this metric? Can you speak to this in the introduction? What do other studies indicate drove that improvement in rural parts of Ethiopia, and why, if absent in Wonago, was it not present in the case you are discussing? These seem pertinent points that could be better addressed in the introduction, adding deeper nuance to the presentation of your case and moving away from the more generic discussion of sanitation improvement policies and the SDGs currently there. On pg 15, you write: A recent survey on the availability and utilization of improved sanitation facilities unearthed that, while the coverage of improved sanitation facilities in the study area was 27.3%, the number of people who utilized improved sanitation facilities stood at 64.5% [22]. Can you tell us more about this finding and study, particularly given its focus on the Wonago district? The findings you report explain very little from the study you cite, yet it would seem rather relevant to discuss it further in your paper. Reviewer #2: This paper explores the barriers to adoption and use of improved sanitation facilities in rural Ethiopia. 15 focus groups plus 10 key informant interviews across 3 rural communities. Barriers to adoption and use were categorized into contextual factors (gender; education; personal preference; limited space; population density; status of land ownership); psychosocial factors (culture; beliefs, attitudes and perceptions of minimal health threat from children’s faeces), and technological factors (inconvenience in acquiring materials; costs of constructing the latrine) using the IBM WASH framework. Conclusion – communities in developing nations require money and training; and, those who provide money and training require cultural sensitivity to local customs and norms/mores. This is a very thorough reporting of a very comprehensive study of a very important issue. Well presented, well written. I only have one comment which I think is very important but because there is only one issue, in my view, I suggested minor review. My issue is: the IBM-WASH model is applied relatively uncritically. That is, I fully appreciate its development is well grounded in the literature and it was developed by leading WASH scholars, but no framework is perfect and I wonder if the authors might address a this issue somewhat in the discussion or conclusions of their paper. For example, an alternative framework might use context (e.g., population density; land ownership), composition (e.g., gender, education, personal preference) and collective (e.g., cultural norms such as the attitudes toward children's faeces). The authors DO hint a bit at some of the shortcomings of the framework in the limitations, but it's more implicit than explicit. To be clear, I am not suggesting at all that the use of the IBM-WASH framework is incorrect or that the authors should switch to an alternative framework. Rather, I would just like them to engage with the framework they chose a little bit more through a critical lense regarding its strengths as well as its weaknesses. ********** 6. 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Revision 1 |
PONE-D-20-32012R1 Exploring Barriers to the Adoption and Utilization of Improved Sanitation Facilities in rural Ethiopia: An Integrated Behavioral Model for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (IBM-WASH) Approach PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Tamene, 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. I am satisfied that you have responded appropriately to the reviewers' comments. I would request one further small change. Best practice for qualitative research is to follow the SRQR checklist. The manuscript mostly fulfils those criteria, with the exception of an explanation (which can be brief) as to how the FGD participants were recruited. Please add a couple of sentences to explain this. Please submit your revised manuscript by Feb 06 2021 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:
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, Susan Horton Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (if provided): Thank you for responding appropriately to the reviewers' comments. I would ask you to make one small additional further change, namely, just prior to Table 1, include a couple of sentences explaining how the participants were recruited for the two FGD. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] [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. |
Revision 2 |
Exploring Barriers to the Adoption and Utilization of Improved Sanitation Facilities in rural Ethiopia: An Integrated Behavioral Model for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (IBM-WASH) Approach PONE-D-20-32012R2 Dear Dr. Tamene, 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, Susan Horton Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Thank you for making the final revisions so quickly. I look forward to seeing the article published. |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-20-32012R2 Exploring Barriers to the Adoption and Utilization of Improved Latrine Facilities in rural Ethiopia: An Integrated Behavioral Model for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (IBM-WASH) Approach Dear Dr. Tamene: 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. Susan Horton Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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