Is it really “panic buying”? Public perceptions and experiences of extra buying at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic

Evangelos Ntontis; Sara Vestergren; Patricio Saavedra; Fergus Neville; Klara Jurstakova; Chris Cocking; Siugmin Lay; John Drury; Clifford Stott; Stephen Reicher; Vivian L. Vignoles

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0264618

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionNovember 16, 2021
2 Jan 2022 Decision Letter - Mumtaz Alam, Editor PONE-D-21-36415Is it really “panic buying”? Public perceptions and experiences of extra buying at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic Dear Dr. Ntontis, 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 submit your revised manuscript by Feb 16 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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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 amend your current ethics statement to address the following concerns: a) Did participants provide their written or verbal informed consent to participate in this study? b) If consent was verbal, please explain i) why written consent was not obtained, ii) how you documented participant consent, and iii) whether the ethics committees/IRB approved this consent procedure. 3. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: “The research presented here was supported by a QR seed grant by the School of Psychology and Life Sciences at Canterbury Christ Church University awarded to Evangelos Ntontis, and by a UKRI grant awarded to John Drury, Clifford Stott, Stephen Reicher, Fergus Neville and Evangelos Ntontis (ES/V005383/1).” Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript." If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 4. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: “The research presented here was supported by a QR seed grant by the School of Psychology and Life Sciences at Canterbury Christ Church University awarded to Evangelos Ntontis, and by a UKRI grant awarded to John Drury, Clifford Stott, Stephen Reicher, Fergus Neville and Evangelos Ntontis (ES/V005383/1).” We note that you have provided additional information within the Acknowledgements Section that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. Please note that 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. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: “The research presented here was supported by a QR seed grant by the School of Psychology and Life Sciences at Canterbury Christ Church University awarded to Evangelos Ntontis, and by a UKRI grant awarded to John Drury, Clifford Stott, Stephen Reicher, Fergus Neville and Evangelos Ntontis (ES/V005383/1).” Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 5. 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. [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: The study is quite interesting and also it is well-written article. I have thoroughly gone through the whole article and found it to be quite interesting paper with good policy implication. Authors have worked alot on all the sections of the paper and thus, I strongly support this article for publication without any further changes. Reviewer #2: I would first like to extend appreciation for your work. Interesting set of thematic analyses. Please find below minor comments/questions: 1. Consent statements have not been included in your manuscript. While it is good that you've included the ethical statement, it would also be important to include the consent statement as well. 2. Can the authors clearly state their exclusion criteria? (Before I read your "limitations" segment, I assumed that you deliberately focused on a specific demographic) 3. I believe you must address the sample size as a limitation maybe, to note that it is in fact to small to be used for generalization of the topic under discussion. ****** 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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264618.r001
Revision 1
7 Jan 2022 Author Response Our responses to the comments raised by the reviewers and the editor have been addressed in the response letter. However, I also copy/paste them here: We would like to thank the editor and the reviewers for their positive comments on our paper as well as for the opportunity to resubmit. In this letter, we address all comments raised. Our responses appear in red below the comments. Kind regards, The authors 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 We have added information in the authors’ affiliations. Also, we have removed funding information from the acknowledgments section and have added a ‘Supporting Information’ section at the end of the manuscript. Supporting information documents as well as the manuscripts have been named accordingly. We have uploaded a manuscript with track changes (in red) and an identical manuscript without track changes. 2. Please amend your current ethics statement to address the following concerns: a) Did participants provide their written or verbal informed consent to participate in this study? b) If consent was verbal, please explain i) why written consent was not obtained, ii) how you documented participant consent, and iii) whether the ethics committees/IRB approved this consent procedure. We have now addressed these comments, which were also shared by Reviewer 2. Please see our response to Reviewer 2 below regarding the text that we have added in our methods section in which we explain the procedure we followed to obtain participants’ consent. In short, consent was verbal after participants had read both the participant information sheet and consent form. Consent was obtained by participants stating it in the recording before the interviews commenced (hence it has been recorded). This form of consent was approved by the ethics committee due to COVID restrictions. 3. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: “The research presented here was supported by a QR seed grant by the School of Psychology and Life Sciences at Canterbury Christ Church University awarded to Evangelos Ntontis, and by a UKRI grant awarded to John Drury, Clifford Stott, Stephen Reicher, Fergus Neville and Evangelos Ntontis (ES/V005383/1).” Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript." If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. We have amended the financial disclosure, which now reads as: The research presented here was supported by a QR seed grant by the School of Psychology and Life Sciences at Canterbury Christ Church University awarded to Evangelos Ntontis, and by a UKRI grant awarded to John Drury, Clifford Stott, Stephen Reicher, Fergus Neville and Evangelos Ntontis (ES/V005383/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. 4. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: “The research presented here was supported by a QR seed grant by the School of Psychology and Life Sciences at Canterbury Christ Church University awarded to Evangelos Ntontis, and by a UKRI grant awarded to John Drury, Clifford Stott, Stephen Reicher, Fergus Neville and Evangelos Ntontis (ES/V005383/1).” We note that you have provided additional information within the Acknowledgements Section that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. Please note that 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. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: “The research presented here was supported by a QR seed grant by the School of Psychology and Life Sciences at Canterbury Christ Church University awarded to Evangelos Ntontis, and by a UKRI grant awarded to John Drury, Clifford Stott, Stephen Reicher, Fergus Neville and Evangelos Ntontis (ES/V005383/1).” Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. We have now removed the financial statement from the main manuscript. The financial/funding statement that we would like to include is the following: The research presented here was supported by a QR seed grant by the School of Psychology and Life Sciences at Canterbury Christ Church University awarded to Evangelos Ntontis, and by a UKRI grant awarded to John Drury, Clifford Stott, Stephen Reicher, Fergus Neville and Evangelos Ntontis (ES/V005383/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. 5. 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. We have reviewed our reference list and verify that details are accurate, links are working, and no papers have been retracted since our paper was submitted. Thus, no changes to the reference list have been made. Comments from Reviewer 1 Reviewer #1: The study is quite interesting and also it is well-written article. I have thoroughly gone through the whole article and found it to be quite interesting paper with good policy implication. Authors have worked alot on all the sections of the paper and thus, I strongly support this article for publication without any further changes. Thank you for your kind words and suggestion to accept the paper as it is. Comments from Reviewer 2 Reviewer #2: I would first like to extend appreciation for your work. Interesting set of thematic analyses. Please find below minor comments/questions: 1. Consent statements have not been included in your manuscript. While it is good that you've included the ethical statement, it would also be important to include the consent statement as well. We have included the following statement in the method section: “Before the interviews commenced, participants had to provide the interviewers with their consent. Since the interviews were carried out online or while observing social distancing measures, a consent form was sent to participants in advance electronically together with a participant information sheet which described the aims of the project. Participants then had to confirm verbally that they read and understood the information sheet, that their participation was voluntary and that they could withdraw at any point without the need to provide a reason, that they agreed to the interview being audio recorded, that their information would be kept strictly confidential in line with the lead author’s University Research Privacy Notice, and that they agreed to take part in the project overall.” 2. Can the authors clearly state their exclusion criteria? (Before I read your "limitations" segment, I assumed that you deliberately focused on a specific demographic) Thank you for this observation. Our inclusion criteria are discussed in the ‘participants, recruitment, and interview questions’ section, where we state that ‘Our only inclusion criteria were that participants were over 18 years old and resided in the United Kingdom at the onset and through the early course of the pandemic’. However, we also added the following sentences which make our sampling strategy more explicit: ‘We used opportunity sampling and participants were recruited through personal contacts, snowballing, and social media (Facebook, Twitter) on the basis of their willingness to participate in our study. Thus, the sample is not representative of the UK population’ 3. I believe you must address the sample size as a limitation maybe, to note that it is in fact to small to be used for generalization of the topic under discussion. We have added a few lines in our discussion where we highlight sample size limitations as well: “Third, our sample was relatively small (but nevertheless typical for semi-structured, qualitative interview studies), young, and not representative in terms of age, socioeconomic status, or geographical location. These factors might have affected participants’ risk perceptions and risk tolerance, affecting the findings. Based on the aforementioned limitations, future research should collect data at the time that stockpiling behaviours are observed and from larger and representative samples.” Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264618.r002
15 Feb 2022 Decision Letter - Mumtaz Alam, Editor Is it really “panic buying”? Public perceptions and experiences of extra buying at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic PONE-D-21-36415R1 Dear Dr. Ntontis, 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, Mumtaz Alam, PhD 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 Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 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 Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: 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 Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 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 Reviewer #2: 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: After carefully reviewing the revision, i recommend this paper for final acceptance and appreciating their hardwork for producing good quality research. Reviewer #2: I would like to extend my appreciation to the authors for taking the feedback into the betterment of the manuscript. All prior questions have been addressed. No further comments. ****** 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 Reviewer #2: No https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264618.r003
Formally Accepted
17 Feb 2022 Acceptance Letter - Mumtaz Alam, Editor PONE-D-21-36415R1 Is it really “panic buying”? Public perceptions and experiences of extra buying at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic Dear Dr. Ntontis: 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. Mumtaz Alam Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264618.r004

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