Two (or more) for one: Identifying classes of household energy- and water-saving measures to understand the potential for positive spillover

Angela Sanguinetti; Claire McIlvennie; Marco Pritoni; Susan Schneider

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0268879

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionFebruary 23, 2021
21 Apr 2021 Decision Letter - Damian Adams, Editor PONE-D-21-05773 Two (or More) for One: Identifying Classes of Household Energy- and Water-Saving Measures to Understand the Potential for Positive Spillover PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Sanguinetti, 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. Both reviewers provided what appear to be thoughtful and reasonable comments that, if fully addressed, should improve the manuscript. Please fully address each one. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jun 05 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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Most of the reviewer comments are minor in nature, however there are a couple that relate to the modeling and may require additional analysis. There are also several suggestions for improving the readability of the paper more generally. As you prepare your revision, please be sure to carefully address each of the reviewer comments, and to clearly identify in your response document how each was handled. Thank you very much, Damian Adams 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 2. Please ensure that you include a title page within your main document. We do appreciate that you have a title page document uploaded as a separate file, however, as per our author guidelines (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-title-page) we do require this to be part of the manuscript file itself and not uploaded separately. Could you therefore please include the title page into the beginning of your manuscript file itself, listing all authors and affiliations. 3. Please include additional information regarding the survey or questionnaire used in the study and ensure that you have provided sufficient details that others could replicate the analyses. For instance, if you developed a questionnaire as part of this study and it is not under a copyright more restrictive than CC-BY, please include a copy, in both the original language and English, as Supporting Information. 4. We noted in your submission details that a portion of your manuscript may have been presented or published elsewhere. "We published some of the basic results in a conference paper, but this paper includes major novel data analysis, including network analysis and regression analyses." Please clarify whether this [conference proceeding or publication] was peer-reviewed and formally published. If this work was previously peer-reviewed and published, in the cover letter please provide the reason that this work does not constitute dual publication and should be included in the current manuscript. 5. Please amend your manuscript to include your abstract after the title page. 6. Please ensure that you refer to Figure 2 in your text as, if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the figure. [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 goal of this manuscript is to identify energy- and water-saving measure classes within which positive behavioral spillovers may occur. Using cluster analysis to analyze survey data from 1,000 households in a city in California that reported adoption of 75 energy- and/or water- saving measures, the authors identified eight water-energy-saving measure classes. The manuscript is generally well written and the methods used are appropriate. Some specific comments and suggestions for the authors are provided below: 1. The authors should state the goal of the paper much earlier in the introduction. I was on page three of the introduction and still found myself wondering what this paper does or how it contributes to the literature described in the introduction. 2. Which city was the HWR program implemented? How big is the city? 3. In your literature review you report studies that explored either energy-saving measure classes or water-saving measure classes. Have prior studies explored both water-energy-saving measure classes? 4. Your sample characteristics are reported compared to population of California or population of the US? 5. What are the summary statistics of other behaviors included in the analysis in regression analysis in Table 6? 6. Abbreviations under Table 1 should be spelled out. 7. How generalizable are your findings beyond a city in Riverside County, California? 8. How does the fact that the behaviors are self-reported impact your results? Could this introduce any bias in your analysis? 9. What is the impact of participant in the program on the survey responses? In other words, do you expect that participants tend to over- or under- estimate certain water- and energy- saving behaviors? How would this impact your results? 10. The use of network analysis is a great way to visualize measure classes and help highlight potential for intra- and inter-class spillovers. The fact that this is the first application of network analysis in this context should be highlighted as a contribution in the conclusion in addition to mentioning it on p. 13. 11. The fact that assignment into treatment and control groups within HWR program could have influenced your results is a serious concern. Have you done the analysis separately on treatment and control groups? How are they different? 12. p. 7: change Jessoe and colleagues (2017) to Jessoe et al. (2017) Reviewer #2: Two (or more) for one: identifying classes of household energy-and water-saving measures to understand the potential for positive spillover This study analyzed data from survey of 1,000 California residents and grouped into eight different classes using cluster analysis. Such classification is helpful to targeting specific groups and designing specific intervention based on their characteristics, therefore, tailoring cost-effective programs. The study has uniquely used a network analysis technique to visualize measure classes identified in multivariate analysis. The authors thoroughly discuss the results and provide important management implications. Here are my suggestions: • Table 1 clearly shows the difference in population and sample in terms of % of female, income, education, housing tenure, household size, did you do non-response bias check? You should mention why the sample is quite different than population. • Figure 1 can be deleted as it is already explained in the text. • In page 18, first para, should not this be “figure 2” as you are referring to eight classes in the figure? • Consider revising the Table 4 as it included the categories used by Boudet et al. When I look at the title, it seems all the table items are from this study. • In-text reference is not consistent. For instance, page 6, para 1 (comma separate two citations) • Italicized the survey questions to make it distinct than other text in the manuscript? • My suggestion is to provide IRB information or at least mentioned that survey protocol was approved by IRB • Different Likert scales were used for different items in page 10. Authors should clearly mention the Likert scale type or levels used in the survey. • Page 11, authors said that items with factor loading more than 0.32 were included in the analysis. But, a common practice is considering factor loading over 0.40 (e.g.Vaske, 2008). • The reference list has to be revised thoroughly by following the journal guideline. Citations in reference list are also not consistent. For example, Consortium for Energy Efficiency. (2018 mentioned “posted”, Frankel et al. 2013 menionted “retrieved”; Cooper et al. 2007, Hawken 2017 is not complete; DOI for several references is missing • It should be helpful for readers if a copy of survey is available as supplement material • It should be be ….validated in Karlin et al. (2014) in page 27? • Consider changing title of Fig. 3 as it does not provide detail information. ****** 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. 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Revision 1
2 Nov 2021 Author Response Response to Reviewers Dear editor and reviewers, We are grateful for your thoughtful feedback, suggestions, and guidance. We have addressed each comment carefully and hopefully to your satisfaction. We certainly feel it is a much stronger paper now as a result. Editor/journal feedback 1. Format in journal style; templates: 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 Done. 2. Could you therefore please include the title page into the beginning of your manuscript file itself, listing all authors and affiliations. Done. 3. Please include additional information regarding the survey or questionnaire used in the study and ensure that you have provided sufficient details that others could replicate the analyses. For instance, if you developed a questionnaire as part of this study and it is not under a copyright more restrictive than CC-BY, please include a copy, in both the original language and English, as Supporting Information. We have included the survey instrument for the treatment group as supporting material. This version is similar to the Control group version except that it also includes a few questions about the home water report program. Included. 4. We noted in your submission details that a portion of your manuscript may have been presented or published elsewhere. "We published some of the basic results in a conference paper, but this paper includes major novel data analysis, including network analysis and regression analyses." Please clarify whether this [conference proceeding or publication] was peer-reviewed and formally published. If this work was previously peer-reviewed and published, in the cover letter please provide the reason that this work does not constitute dual publication and should be included in the current manuscript. The following explanation has been added to the portal and cover letter: The former output was peer-reviewed and is included in the conference proceedings for the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) 2020 convention, which is not formally published; the papers are given to each attendee on a CD and published on the organization’s website, but not assigned a DOI or indexed in any academic database. The only overlap with this paper is the Principal Component Analysis of energy- and water-saving measures. The conference paper does not include the network analysis or the regression analysis. It was necessary to present the PCA again in this paper because it is the basis of the network analysis and regression analysis. As Reviewer 1 notes, the network analysis is a very novel approach worth highlighting. The regression analysis also adds considerably to our understanding of the measure classes. 5. Please amend your manuscript to include your abstract after the title page. Added. 6. Please ensure that you refer to Figure 2 in your text as, if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the figure. Done. Reviewer #1 1. The authors should state the goal of the paper much earlier in the introduction. I was on page three of the introduction and still found myself wondering what this paper does or how it contributes to the literature described in the introduction. We extensively revised the introduction section in order to describe the research aims much earlier. 2. Which city was the HWR program implemented? How big is the city? City of Riverside, population ~330,000. This information has been added. 3. In your literature review you report studies that explored either energy-saving measure classes or water-saving measure classes. Have prior studies explored both water-energy-saving measure classes? Very few and none that are as remarkable as the ones described, and thank you for highlighting that this point was unclear. We have extensively revised this section of the literature review to make that clear. 4. Your sample characteristics are reported compared to population of California or population of the US? It was a mix defined by table notes, but we have updated to reflect Riverside County to be a more precise estimate of sample representativeness relative to the+ treatment-eligible population. 5. What are the summary statistics of other behaviors included in the analysis in regression analysis in Table 6? We have added these in a Table (now Table 6). 6. Abbreviations under Table 1 should be spelled out. Addressed. 7. How generalizable are your findings beyond a city in Riverside County, California? We now address this in the limitations section: The generalizability of findings may be somewhat limited due to the specific geographical context. There could be geographically based differences in terms of the measures within a given class because different measures may be available in different places. However, the measure classes themselves should be less affected by these variations because adoption of whichever measures within a given class that are available should correlate. 8. How does the fact that the behaviors are self-reported impact your results? Could this introduce any bias in your analysis? 9. What is the impact of participant in the program on the survey responses? In other words, do you expect that participants tend to over- or under- estimate certain water- and energy- saving behaviors? How would this impact your results? We now address these issues more fully in the limitations section (our response to question 11 is also relevant here): ...surveying households in the context of the HWR program may have influenced the results. Relying on self-reported behaviors could have introduced response error, and demand characteristics are a particular concern among treatment participants who may have over-reported engaging in measures that were promoted in the HWRs. 10. The use of network analysis is a great way to visualize measure classes and help highlight potential for intra- and inter-class spillovers. The fact that this is the first application of network analysis in this context should be highlighted as a contribution in the conclusion in addition to mentioning it on p. 13. Done. 11. The fact that assignment into treatment and control groups within HWR program could have influenced your results is a serious concern. Have you done the analysis separately on treatment and control groups? How are they different? This is an important point. We did do a separate analysis but unfortunately we think the sample size of the control group was too small to yield a meaningful result. We expanded this discussion in the limitations section: To test whether and how the HWR treatment may have influenced the PCA results, we performed a separate PCA on only data from control group members, which comprised a relatively small subset of the sample (n = 163), to compare to the overall model dominated by data from treatment participants. The results were not easily interpretable, which is likely due to the small sample size [29]. Replications of this research in other contexts are needed to validate the results. 12. p. 7: change Jessoe and colleagues (2017) to Jessoe et al. (2017) Done and changed the two other occurrences of “and colleagues” in other citations as well. Reviewer #2 1. Table 1 clearly shows the difference in population and sample in terms of % of female, income, education, housing tenure, household size, did you do non-response bias check? You should mention why the sample is quite different than population. We did not do a non-response bias check; however, we have edited the population statistics in the table to much more closely reflect the local population (of treatment eligible households). Now only gender and housing tenure are markedly different and we speculate the reasons for this when the table is introduced. 2. Figure 1 can be deleted as it is already explained in the text. Done. 3. In page 18, first para, should not this be “figure 2” as you are referring to eight classes in the figure? Yes, thanks for catching that typo, although now it is Figure 1 again given the deletion of the original Figure 1. 4. Consider revising the Table 4 as it included the categories used by Boudet et al. When I look at the title, it seems all the table items are from this study. Table title has been revised to be more clear. 5. In-text reference is not consistent. For instance, page 6, para 1 (comma separate two citations) Citations have been re-formatted per journal style guidelines. 6. Italicized the survey questions to make it distinct than other text in the manuscript? Done. 7. My suggestion is to provide IRB information or at least mentioned that survey protocol was approved by IRB Done. 8. Different Likert scales were used for different items in page 10. Authors should clearly mention the Likert scale type or levels used in the survey. We now include the survey instrument as supporting material. 9. Page 11, authors said that items with factor loading more than 0.32 were included in the analysis. But, a common practice is considering factor loading over 0.40 (e.g.Vaske, 2008). We provide a reference to support our use of 0.32. 10. The reference list has to be revised thoroughly by following the journal guideline. Citations in reference list are also not consistent. For example, Consortium for Energy Efficiency. (2018 mentioned “posted”, Frankel et al. 2013 menionted “retrieved”; Cooper et al. 2007, Hawken 2017 is not complete; DOI for several references is missing Citations and references have been re-formatted per journal style guidelines. 11. It should be helpful for readers if a copy of survey is available as supplement material Done. 12. It should be be ….validated in Karlin et al. (2014) in page 27? No, Karlin et al. hypothesized that there would be three categories of household energy-saving measures: efficiency, curtailment, and maintenance, but they only found curtailment and efficiency. Measures they thought would load onto a third “maintenance” factor loaded with efficiency measures. We think we identified the category because we had so many more measures in our analysis (75, compared to their 8). 13. Consider changing title of Fig. 3 as it does not provide detail information. Good point. It is has been revised to provide more detail. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268879.r002
11 May 2022 Decision Letter - Vassilis G. Aschonitis, Editor Two (or More) for One: Identifying Classes of Household Energy- and Water-Saving Measures to Understand the Potential for Positive Spillover PONE-D-21-05773R1 Dear Dr. Sanguinetti, 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, Vassilis G. Aschonitis 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: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Thank you for addressing my comments. I think the manuscript has been thoroughly, and therefore, has been improved a lot than previous version. ****** 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.0268879.r003
Formally Accepted
23 Jun 2022 Acceptance Letter - Vassilis G. Aschonitis, Editor PONE-D-21-05773R1 Two (or more) for one: Identifying classes of household energy- and water-saving measures to understand the potential for positive spillover Dear Dr. Sanguinetti: 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. Vassilis G. Aschonitis Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268879.r004

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