PONE-D-21-07749

Validation of the Polish version of the Motivational Postures (Towards Taxes) Questionnaire

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Kołodziej,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but it needs proofreading. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript. Feel free to reflect on comments from reviewers but mandatory is only fixing typos.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jun 19 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:

• 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. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Frantisek Sudzina

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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 provide additional details regarding participant consent. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified (1) whether consent was informed and (2) what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal, and if verbal, how it was documented and witnessed). If your study included minors, state whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians. If the need for consent was waived by the ethics committee, please include this information.

If you are reporting a retrospective study of medical records or archived samples, please ensure that you have discussed whether all data were fully anonymized before you accessed them and/or whether the IRB or ethics committee waived the requirement for informed consent. If patients provided informed written consent to have data from their medical records used in research, please include this information.

3. Your abstract cannot contain citations. Please only include citations in the body text of the manuscript, and ensure that they remain in ascending numerical order on first mention.

[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: 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

Reviewer #2: 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

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: Review: PONE-D-21-07749 Validation of the Polish version of the Motivational Postures (Towards Taxes) Questionnaire

This paper is extremely clearly written and the research is rigorously undertaken. I have no hesitation in recommending publication. The following comments would, I believe, strengthen the paper. But the quality of the paper merits publication as it stands.

The paper does an excellent job of explaining that both context and person characteristics shape motivational posturing in the introduction. This applies to the strength of the postures and also to the specific forms that the postures take. This means that there are two levels of analysis for a paper such as this. Does the general form of the posturing hold across different tax/regulatory regimes? And if the general form does hold up, what is our process for developing specific items that reflect the particular manifestations of these general postures in particular countries. I would argue they will be different because the context both administrative and legal has its own effect on the specific expressions of the general posture. This is how I understand the differences in commitment/moral duty and gameplaying/pleasant games). This is why, in my view, this paper is so very important. But I think this point is not really made in the paper as it is presented at the moment. Let me explain what I mean below with this example.

In Poland, duty to pay tax is the lynchpin of a commitment to taxation, not for example, willingness to pay more than one has to or do the right thing in paying tax. How do we make sense of this? In Australia, the tax system for employees is pay-as-you-go so when we do our annual tax return, many look forward to receiving a tax refund. Some would say in this situation, “I can’t be bothered finding all my deductions, this will do.” Others would say “I am very careful to pay only the tax I need to”. In other words, paying more than you probably needed to and paying exactly what you need to come together as commitment. If there is no pay-as-you-go system or if you are a small business owner and you are doing your tax return to calculate annually how much you have to pay, there is no little nudge that will lead you to pay more than you need to! It is a big job and that alone will mean you are likely to pay just what you are legally obligated to pay. So moral obligation separates at the level of specific items from I am happy to pay my tax or words to that effect.

Similarly, I would argue that game playing/pleasant games is very much expressed in context – depending on the country’s tax system and administration. The items will be different (and I have experienced similar differences when measuring postures in work health and safety rather than taxation). The basic ideas are the same however – the higher order construct if you like. The pattern of correlations in Study 3 makes me think this is the case.

The authors should only make these changes if they wish – I am not suggesting this is necessary for publication. I think it is just an important contribution for someone to make in this field of research.

There are some specific typos that should be corrected and a few minor points along the way:

Line 300 each instead of ech

Line 316 Should this be anonymously ?

Line 404 al. not all.

Line 509-510 By saying “correlated positively” the author means that having individual and social standards against tax cheating is positively correlated with moral duty etc. The individual and social standards scale are scored so that a high score means tolerance of tax cheating as I read the scale descriptions and the negative correlations in Table 1. It would be desirable to clarify the fact that the way the scale is scored produces the negative correlations, but these negative correlations reflect an association between adopting standards against tax cheating and moral duty.

Line 515 Braithwaite’s work on gameplaying in Defiance in Taxation and Governance clearly shows game playing as a Zero-sum game life view. See SEM analysis in the book on http://valeriebraithwaite.com

Line 556-557 I particularly like the way these data confirm Braithwaite’s values work (again the Defiance book on the website) that there is some stability in these postures. Someone ideologically opposed to tax is not likely to turn into a moral duty advocate for tax because of the values base (represented in this work as philosophy of life).

P606 dichotomous nature of postures. I see this argument. Psychological research on context tells us people are complex however. Post-Covid may be more people will hate the tax authorities but feel a duty to pay. A question for future research!

I enjoyed this paper very much. It was a pleasure to review it. Thank you.

Reviewer #2: The article shows results of the adaptation process of the Braithwaite’s Motivational Postures (Towards Taxes) Questionnaire (MPQ) to Polish language and cultural conditions. The adaptation attempt is properly placed in the context of the Braithwaite’s (2002) concept of five tax related motivational postures. The original questionnaire is presented sufficiently and so are the steps of the adaptation. The Author conducted three studies that show construction and validation of the Polish version of MPQ. The way the Author analyses the data and present the analyses is appropriate and adequate. The only criticism relates to the use of Cronbach’s alpha as a reliability measure of subscales which consists less than 10 items (even as little as two). In such a case item-rest of the scale correlations should be included. Generally the results show clearly that the Polish adaptation of the MPQ has good psychometric properties and can be used in research on Polish samples. The use of the adaptation can extend the knowledge about tax-related attitudes and behaviors by including data from a different than western cultural and economic reality.

The manuscript is well organized and written clearly enough to be accessible to non-specialists.

Original data are available; they are deposited in appropriate repositories.

**********

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: No

Reviewer #2: No

[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.

Validation of the Polish version of the Motivational Postures (Towards Taxes) Questionnaire

PONE-D-21-07749R1

Dear Dr. Kołodziej,

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,

Frantisek Sudzina

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: