The Covid-19 pandemic and mental health of first-year college students: Examining the effect of Covid-19 stressors using longitudinal data

Jane Cooley Fruehwirth; Siddhartha Biswas; Krista M. Perreira

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0247999

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionDecember 21, 2020
25 Jan 2021 Decision Letter - Chung-Ying Lin, Editor PONE-D-20-40119 The Covid-19 Pandemic and Mental Health of First-Year College Students: Examining the Effect of Covid-19 Stressors Using Longitudinal Data PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Fruehwirth, 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. One reviewer has commented minor revision for your contribution and I agree with his decision. Therefore, I would like to invite you to revise your work after considering his comments. Moreover, I would appreciate that if you can consider the following references on your revision: Pramukti, I., Strong, C., Sitthimongkol, Y., Setiawan, A., Pandin M. G. R., Yen, C.-F., Lin, C.-Y., Griffiths, M. D., Ko, N.-Y. (2020). Anxiety and suicidal thoughts during the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-country comparison among Indonesian, Taiwanese, and Thai university students. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(12), e24487. Nathiya D, Singh P, Suman S, Raj P, Tomar BS. Mental health problems and impact on youth minds during the COVID-19 outbreak: Cross-sectional (RED-COVID) survey. Soc Health Behav 2020;3:83-8 Akdeniz G, Kavakci M, Gozugok M, Yalcinkaya S, Kucukay A, Sahutogullari B. A survey of attitudes, anxiety Status, and protective behaviors of the university students during the COVID-19 outbreak in Turkey. Front Psychiatry 2020;11:695 Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 11 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. 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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: I Don't Know ****** 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). 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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: Overall, this article showed an interesting topic as it is important to see the changes anxiety level among the students pre and post-pandemic. However, there were several parts need to be clarified as follows: 1. In the background section, the authors mentioned that the first-year students is critical for academic success. What does it mean? What makes it critical? 2. In table 1, the authors listed the demographic characteristic among the two samples (cross-sectional and longitudinal). Why the authors did not include the family income as it mentioned earlier in the background as the related factors. 3. Table 5 looks not clear. Why did the author provide three marginal effect with different values? Why did the sample in column 3,4,7,8 are different? What makes the difference? How did the authors deal with this issue? 4. Still in table 5, why the authors were not able to calculate the odds ratio as this is important to find the likelihood to have high anxiety? 5. On page 18-19, the authors mentioned we found that students who were already experiencing mental health problems pre-pandemic were at greater odds of experiencing severe symptoms mid-pandemic. Minor comments: Period should be placed after the citation. Please see the guideline. ****** 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:** Iqbal Pramukti, Ph.D. [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. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Comments for PONE-D-20-40119.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247999.r001
Revision 1
10 Feb 2021 Author Response Dear Editor, Thank you for the opportunity to submit a revised version of The Covid-19 Pandemic and Mental Health of First-Year College Students: Examining the Effect of Covid-19 Stressors Using Longitudinal Data” for your consider for publication as a research article in PLOS ONE. We include below our responses to each of your comments and to those of the referee. We put our responses in italics. We have incorporated the references you mentioned in the text on lines 150-162. They are listed here with their reference number: (26) Pramukti, I., Strong, C., Sitthimongkol, Y., Setiawan, A., Pandin M. G. R., Yen, C.-F., Lin, C.-Y., Griffiths, M. D., Ko, N.-Y. (2020). Anxiety and suicidal thoughts during the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-country comparison among Indonesian, Taiwanese, and Thai university students. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(12), e24487. (30) Nathiya D, Singh P, Suman S, Raj P, Tomar BS. Mental health problems and impact on youth minds during the COVID-19 outbreak: Cross-sectional (RED-COVID) survey. Soc Health Behav 2020;3:83-8 (29) Akdeniz G, Kavakci M, Gozugok M, Yalcinkaya S, Kucukay A, Sahutogullari B. A survey of attitudes, anxiety Status, and protective behaviors of the university students during the COVID-19 outbreak in Turkey. Front Psychiatry 2020;11:695 We have addressed the style requirements as requested in your letter. In formatting the tables to meet the style requirement, we divided Table 5 from our previous submission, into two tables (now Tables 5 and 6) to better fit in the document. We also include the following prompts and our responses with data availability: a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially sensitive information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. The UNC ethics committee has deemed that the data contain potentially sensitive information and that there is a possibility of deductive disclosure, so that the human subjects approval does not allow us to share the de-identified data. The de-identified data will be made available upon request to the Deputy Director of Research at the UNC Carolina Population Center (TransitionsDataRequest@office.unc.edu) with an appropriate restricted use data agreement in place. We have also added the supporting information captions at the end of the text and updated our Supporting Information files and in-text citations in accordance with the journal guidelines. Please let us know if there are any other questions or concerns we can address. Sincerely, Jane Fruehwirth, Siddartha Biswas and Krista Perreira Referee Comments with Responses in Italics Thank you for taking the time to review our article and for the improvements you suggest. Overall, this article showed an interesting topic as it is important to see the changes anxiety level among the students pre and post-pandemic. However, there were several parts need to be clarified as follows: 1. In the background section, the authors mentioned that the first-year students is critical for academic success. What does it mean? What makes it critical? Thank you for this comment. We adjusted this text, which is on lines 110-123 to clarify. It now indicates “ This study focuses on a diverse sample of first-year students. The first year is understood to be a particularly challenging year for students given the transition to a new school environment and the increased independence students experience [12,13].” We also added citations to support the statement. 2. In table 1, the authors listed the demographic characteristic among the two samples (cross-sectional and longitudinal). Why the authors did not include the family income as it mentioned earlier in the background as the related factors. We clarify on line 271 that free/reduced price lunch status is the proxy we have for low-income. This is the measure that is included in Table 1. 3. Table 5 looks not clear. Why did the author provide three marginal effect with different values? Why did the sample in column 3,4,7,8 are different? What makes the difference? How did the authors deal with this issue? Thanks for pointing this out. Column 3(4) were marginal effects from a logistic regression on students without (with) moderate-severe anxiety symptoms in Wave I. Column 7(8) were marginal effects from a logistic regression on students without (with) moderate-severe depression symptoms in Wave I. We expected results to be different on these subsamples and discuss in the text how results differ for those with and without symptoms in Wave I. Please note that for formatting purposes these results are now split between Table 5 (first 4 columns from previous table with moderate-severe anxiety symptoms as the dependent variable) and Table 6 (last 4 columns from previous table with moderate-severe depression symptoms as the dependent variable), but reported marginal effects are the same. We explain this more clearly now on lines 400 to 402. This reads: “The remaining regressions in Table 5 (6) were estimated separately for those with and those without Wave I anxiety (depression) symptoms and did not control for Wave I anxiety (depression) symptoms as a result.” We also add a row at the bottom of Tables 5 and 6 to indicate that the first two regressions were estimated on the whole sample. We also clarify the other row in the table that indicates whether the sample was estimated on the sample with or without Wave I symptoms. We changed the text from: “Moderate to severe symptoms in W1” to read now “Moderate to severe anxiety symptoms in Wave I?” and a similar row for Table 6, but replacing “anxiety” with “depression”. 4. Still in table 5, why the authors were not able to calculate the odds ratio as this is important to find the likelihood to have high anxiety? We changed this so that we now report odds ratios for the regressions on the overall sample along with the marginal effects. Previously we just mentioned a preference for marginal effects given that it allows us to compare across model specifications. We explain the logic now for the marginal effects in more detail on lines 402 to 413. It reads: “Odds ratios cannot be compared across model specifications when the sample or conditioning set changes, whereas marginal effects can be compared [43,44].” This is particularly important in our setting given that we want to compare how effect sizes change across different subsamples of our data and when we change the conditioning set. 5. On page 18-19, the authors mentioned we found that students who were already experiencing mental health problems pre-pandemic were at greater odds of experiencing severe symptoms mid-pandemic. This is correct. In our models, we include a covariate for the students’ mental health pre-pandemic at Wave I. We now report both marginal effects (column 2) and odds ratios (column 1). The marginal effect of Wave I anxiety symptoms is 0.16 (Table 5) and the marginal effect of Wave I depression symptoms is 0.32 (Table 6). The corresponding odds ratios are 3.58 and 5.24 respectively. Minor comments: Period should be placed after the citation. Please see the guideline. These are now fixed. Thanks for pointing out this error. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247999.r002
18 Feb 2021 Decision Letter - Chung-Ying Lin, Editor The Covid-19 Pandemic and Mental Health of First-Year College Students: Examining the Effect of Covid-19 Stressors Using Longitudinal Data PONE-D-20-40119R1 Dear Dr. Fruehwirth, 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, Chung-Ying Lin Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247999.r003
Formally Accepted
22 Feb 2021 Acceptance Letter - Chung-Ying Lin, Editor PONE-D-20-40119R1 The Covid-19 pandemic and mental health of first-year college students: Examining the effect of Covid-19 stressors using longitudinal data Dear Dr. Fruehwirth: 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. Chung-Ying Lin Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247999.r004

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