Lingering effects of COVID-19 on the mental health of first-year university students in Japan

Ryo Horita; Akihiro Nishio; Mayumi Yamamoto

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0262550

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionOctober 4, 2021
22 Nov 2021 Decision Letter - Chung-Ying Lin, Editor PONE-D-21-31952Lingering effects of COVID-19 on the mental health of first-year university students in JapanPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Horita, 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 expert in this filed has reviewed this work and you will see her detailed comments below. I agree with her opinions that your paper has merits and values during the COVID-19 pandemic periods; however, something (e.g., using regression models to control potential confounders) should be fixed before going forward. Therefore, please carefully respond to her comments for improving your work. Apart from her comments, I personally feel that your paper should integrate more COVID-19 references on university students' mental health. Please see the suggestions below.Sharma R, Bansal P, Chhabra M, Bansal C, Arora M. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2-associated perceived stress and anxiety among Indian medical students: A cross-sectional study. Asian J Soc Health Behav 2021;4:98-104Ahorsu, D. K., Pramukti, I., Strong C., Wnag, H.-W., Griffiths, M. D., Lin, C.-Y., Ko, N.-Y. (2021). COVID-19-related variables and its association with anxiety and suicidal ideation: Differences between international and local university students in Taiwan. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 14, 1857-1866. 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. In addition, please provide the entire CCAPS-Japanese questionnaire as a supplementary file. Regarding the psychometrics of the CCAPS-Japanese (i.e., the comment raised by the reviewer), you can use the present sample to conduct (e.g., Cronbach's alpha or confirmatory factor analysis). ============================== Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 06 2022 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: https://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, Chung-Ying Lin 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 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: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No ****** 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 ****** 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 valuable study. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors investigated the anxiety and depression of first-year college students for three years in an attempt to see and explain the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The following are my comments: Introduction Please explain why it is specifically targeted at first-year college students rather than university students as a whole. Please describe the change in the proportion of anxiety, depression, suicide, violence and other tendencies across the country over the five years before 2019 in order to confirm that the change in numbers was the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, not the long-standing culture of other societies. Methods The authors are recommended to use regression analysis to control confounding factors, for example, gender, department, and family income. Please provide more information about psychometric properties of CCAPS-Japanese. Results Please present the student's department composition in order to reduce the interference of the department with emotional perception. Line 163 I wonder why the author thought η2 = .09 was very small. According to your criteria, 0.09 was medium. Please add the percentages after the number of students. Discussion Please discuss the impact of differences in annual response rates on results. In addition, what is the proportion of the whole school to fill in the questionnaire? How is the questionnaire sent to everyone? Was there a selection bias? Line 212-213 I am confused that the worst depression indicating more depressed or less? For students, the pressure of online courses may only appear in a month or two, after which students will find that classes can be mixed up without going out to save a lot of traffic time. Moreover, they might feel that the line class industry more relaxed due to less social stress. ****** 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 [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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262550.r001
Revision 1
26 Dec 2021 Author Response Response to Reviewer 1: I deeply appreciate your supportive comments. I have edited my previous manuscript, and my responses to your suggestions are as follows. I have also highlighted the corresponding text in the manuscript. Introduction Comment: Please explain why it is specifically targeted at first-year college students rather than university students as a whole. Please describe the change in the proportion of anxiety, depression, suicide, violence and other tendencies across the country over the five years before 2019 in order to confirm that the change in numbers was the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, not the long-standing culture of other societies. Response: Per your suggestion, I explained why the study is specifically targeted at first-year university students (P. 6 L. 97–99). In Japan, there is no national survey on anxiety, depression, and violence. Because I only have access to national surveys on suicide, we described the change in the suicide rates (P. 4 L. 49–53). Methods Comment: The authors are recommended to use regression analysis to control confounding factors, for example, gender, department, and family income. Please provide more information about psychometric properties of CCAPS-Japanese. Response: Thank you for your kind advice. I have conducted multiple regression analysis using biological sex and department, and the results are shown in Tables 3 and 4 in the “Correlation of demographic characteristics and the eight CCAPS-Japanese subscales” and “Discussion” section (P. 17 L. 305–P. 18 L. 314 and P. 21 L. 374–377). We did not ask the participants about family income. We have also described more precisely the description of the CCAPS (P. 8 L. 138–141) and submitted the entire CCAPS-Japanese questionnaire as a supplementary file. Results Comment: Please present the student's department composition in order to reduce the interference of the department with emotional perception. Line 163 I wonder why the author thought Η2 = .09 was very small. According to your criteria, 0.09 was medium. Please add the percentages after the number of students. Response: Thank you for your helpful comments. I have presented the composition of the students by academic department in Table 1. Per your suggestion, I have modified the description of the effect size evaluation. Based on your suggestion, I have demonstrated the percentage data as well as numbers in Table 5. Discussion Comment: Please discuss the impact of differences in annual response rates on results. In addition, what is the proportion of the whole school to fill in the questionnaire? How is the questionnaire sent to everyone? Was there a selection bias? Line 212-213 I am confused that the worst depression indicating more depressed or less? For students, the pressure of online courses may only appear in a month or two, after which students will find that classes can be mixed up without going out to save a lot of traffic time. Moreover, they might feel that the line class industry more relaxed due to less social stress. Response: I appreciate your suggestion. Although there was a difference in the response rate among the three time points, there were no significant differences in the breakdown by sex or academic department in each group, and these percentages were similar to those of Gifu University as a whole. In addition, there was no intention to access the survey. Therefore, I determined that our study did not have any selection bias (P. 16 L. 274–276). The ratio of first-year students to all students is shown in the “Methods” section (P. 6 L. 115––P. 7 L. 116). Instructions on how students were asked to submit the questionnaire were included in the “Methods” section (P. 7 L. 116–121). I apologize for the confusion regarding the wording for depression. I have now clearly stated, “highest scores” for anxiety and depression (P. 16 L. 278). I edited the discussion regarding online classes as you suggested (P. 17 L. 301–304). Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262550.r002
28 Dec 2021 Decision Letter - Chung-Ying Lin, Editor Lingering effects of COVID-19 on the mental health of first-year university students in Japan PONE-D-21-31952R1 Dear Dr. Horita, 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.0262550.r003
Formally Accepted
4 Jan 2022 Acceptance Letter - Chung-Ying Lin, Editor PONE-D-21-31952R1 Lingering effects of COVID-19 on the mental health of first-year university students in Japan Dear Dr. Horita: 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.0262550.r004

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