PONE-D-21-15111

“We are considered to be dust”; a qualitative study on students perceptions on the phenomenon of ragging at a Sri Lankan university

PLOS ONE

Dear Authors,

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 9 September 2021. 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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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Marcel Pikhart

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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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

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: No

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

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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

Reviewer #3: 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: Dear Authors,

This manuscript explores students’ perceptions on the phenomenon of ragging in a university. Any type of bullying, without a doubt, constitutes a serious problem that must be studied in depth.

This is an interesting and important study due, despite this, before it can be published it would need some methodological clarifications and revisions:

- The manuscript does not meet with the sections of the journal.

- Introduction/background seem very long and confused. This journal only has an introductory section. This structure looks like for another journal. The claims are not properly placed in the context of the previous literature, since there are references that show contexts or social situations from more than 20 years ago.

Materials and methods section: “Qualitative research is an approach for exploring and understanding the meaning individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human problem” (Creswell, 2013b, p. 3). In this case, the theoretical approach has not been indicated, is it ethnography, phenomenology, grounded theory? A correct qualitative study needs a strong theoretical foundation.

- Research design needs to be further explained, as well as other subsections of the methods. Following the journal recommendations, I kindly suggest reviewing the CASP and COREQ checklists to ensure the quality of the data reporting. For example, the researcher's relationship with the participants, What grade and semester were the students in?

- I suggest that only current references are used in the discussion, due to changes in this phenomenon in recent years (for example, the introduction of new technologies has changed the type of harassment in different contexts).

- You should mention limitations.

Thank you for the clarifications.

Reviewer #2: I want to thank you for the opportunity to review this manuscript. The time spent creating and shipping it is greatly appreciated. In my humble opinion, it offers interesting results that the scientific community, as well as professionals in this field, can benefit from. However, currently the manuscript presents some problems that must be taken into account and repaired. Here are my recommendations:

There is a total absence of contextualization of the study, the introduction does not justify or theoretically support the research, they should include the hypotheses of the work.

The method is not explicit enough. It does not give details of the data analysis and the software used for the analysis of the transcripts. Likewise, you should expand the information on the characteristics of the participants.

In the discussion section there is no comparison of its results with the initial contextualization. Personally, I am not in favor of using literature in the discussion that has not been previously mentioned in the introduction, since it transmits an incomplete review of the state of the topic investigated, there are several of the citations included in this section that have not been previously cited in the introduction .

It should include the limitations and future lines of research before the conclusions.

The conclusions can be expanded to include and / or give examples of how this information can be useful to the population and the field of education. Authors must make explicit reference to the practical application of the results obtained (this is one of the strengths of the manuscript), paying special attention to the possibilities offered by the data for the design of interventions.

These limitations should be addressed with a view to the possible publication of the manuscript.

Thank you for your work.

Reviewer #3: This is an intriguing report of the findings emerging from focus groups at a university.

Introduction/Background/Theoretical Lenses:

- This section needs more of the explanatory material provided in the Discussion. Please use the introduction to expand more on issues of how ragging is perhaps culturally specific, even though it does have analogues in other cultures. Indeed, please move up much of the information on Sri Lankan society, especially the social classes, that is given in the Discussion. Those facts help the reader to make sense of the data you report and you should give more of that information in your Introduction to help the reader contextualize the findings. You don't need to to talk about all of the details in the introduction, but they do add information that would be helpful to a reader of the introduction

Results:

- The thematic analysis is interesting, but the reader has no sense of how representative it is of the sample of focus groups or individuals. Please go back to the data and make tables to report the number of times each of these themes were mentioned or discussed, variation by gender, and ethnicity. You can also use such data to conduct a grander analysis, like a cluster analysis for the themes. The reader is curious, does the expression of some of these themes within the focus groups overlap with the expression of other themes? That is, are the themes correlated? If so, you could report and discuss such potential patterns in the data. At present, the reader has a rich picture of the general findings and concept of ragging and its social-economic expression at the University, but more concrete numbers would greatly enhance the paper.

Conclusion:

- Please reduce the space given to the Discussion (currently 6 pages) and insert much of that important information in the Background/Theoretical Lenses (which are only 3 pages combined)

Thank you for conducting this important research.

**********

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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PONE-D-21-15111R1

“We are considered to be dust”; a qualitative study on students perceptions on the phenomenon of ragging at a Sri Lankan university

PLOS ONE

Dear Authors,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we have decided that your manuscript does not meet our criteria for publication and must therefore be rejected based on the reviwers´ suggestion. 

I am sorry that we cannot be more positive on this occasion, but hope that you appreciate the reasons for this decision.

Yours sincerely,

Marcel Pikhart

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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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: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: 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: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Partly

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

**********

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: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

**********

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: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: Thank you for addressing the concerns of my review. The paper is now much easier to follow for a non-specialist reader. However I do remain concerned about the lack of any type of quantitative analysis of the data, but I understand that such analyses will be provided in future research.

**********

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.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: 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.]

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For journal use only: PONEDEC3

PONE-D-21-15111R2

“We are considered to be dust”; a qualitative study on students perceptions on the phenomenon of ragging at a Sri Lankan university

Dear Dr Wickramasinghe,

First of all, let me thank you for your patience! I have now finished my assessment of your paper and the previous review process.

Your paper touches on a very important issue that is worth to be presented to the scientific public. However, I have a couple of major concerns that prevent the publication of the paper as it stands. If you see a possibility and feel motivated for a second major and thorough revision that addresses my concerns, it will be a pleasure for us to review this revised version. But I should emphasize that it will be an open decision and that there will be no guarantee that PlosOne publishes a revised version.

Before I go into details of the paper, I will explain my assessment of the previous review process. Similar as you, I was surprised by the rejection of the paper on the basis of three very different reviewer reports. Although it is not unusual that the paper is rejected even if one reviewer accepts the paper, another one wishes major revision and the third reviewer rejects the paper, I think you were justified to expect more involvement and guidance from the academic editor, particularly because the reviewer recommendations diverged. I also share your opinion that at least one of the reviewer may have been a suboptimal choice since s(he) was not very familiar with qualitative methods and asked you to present quantitative details that are only usual in some qualitative methods, such as a qualitative content analysis.

Therefore, I think your appeal was justified as far as we consider the review process. Together with a Division Editor of PlosOne, we decided to re-review your paper. To avoid an undue delay, only one person, me as the new Academic Editor, has reviewed the paper:

1. My first major concern refers to the study question. Although the study question  seems clear on first view – the perception of ragging, seen from the student perspective –, the sample of students that you choose for your study makes the issue ambiguous. One could say, it is a group ‘in - between’. They are no longer freshman who experience ragging at the very moment; they are not 'old' students who are 'entitled' to rag other students. Therefore, some of them may have experienced ragging – we don’t know exactly; some may have observed ragging being in the position of a 'neutral observer' or a 'former affected person' – we don’t know exactly; some seem to prepare themselves to become ‘ragger’ themselves in the near future – we don’t know exactly. But throughout the paper you write more or less as an advocate of the 'victims' (see, for example, lines 114 -118).

I can understand your argument that you did not want to discuss this matter with young students, who may still suffer from ragging or are reminded of this terrible experience in the group discussion, you cannot claim your study addresses the victim perspective (line 116). While this seems to be a limitation of your study, you could also make it to a strength of your study. The experiences of your 'in – between' group may be an optimal opportunity to study how a procedure, which is so burdensome for many young persons, becomes an established and accepted institution in students' life. So you should clarify what you exactly expect from your study – it is definitely not the experience of ragging; in this case young students should have been enrolled. So you should precisely define your scientific interest (e.g., to understand how ragging invades student life and culture). Of course, you can criticize the practice of ragging in the Discussion but you should not use the study participants for this purpose; they are much more ambivalent.

2. My second major concern refers to what you define as the 'overarching theme' of your analysis: "ragging as a means of communication". It was you, not the students, who stimulated a communication about ragging. Even more important, the students first reaction in the group discussion was to emphasize that ragging did not occur (line 391). It seems to be a secret or hidden practice, but definitely not a ‘means of communication’. Perhaps you mean something else but your expression is in any case misleading. By the way, I’m not sure whether you need an overarching theme at all. Isn’t it sufficient to define your subthemes as main themes and to present them as your results?

In this case, it may be a good idea to start the Results section with the issue of 'secrecy' and your overall observation that all groups denied ragging in the beginning of the discussion. This is really striking, given the formative experience of ragging. Obviously, older students try to forget or deny it. This could be the first important result and could later lead to an interesting discussion how difficult it is to make ragging 'public'.

3. Please check the logic of your themes and how you present them in the Results section. I see a couple of inconsistencies so that a re-arrangement may be required. Let me give you several examples:

(a) ‘Trivializing violence’ (lines 415 ff.) is not a subtheme of "Veil of secrecy and silence".

(b) Although the examples under the subtheme "Rigid norms" are interesting, I’m not sure whether all of them belong to the main theme "A society with deep divisions". They deal, for example, with things like a general lack of protection of women (why is this a matter of ‘rigid norms’?). I think, other interesting examples, too, have nothing to do with ‘rigid norms’, such as equalizing (lines 503 ff.) or denying ethnic clashes (lines 536 ff.). Please check the main theme and the subthemes so that they are consistent.    

(c) It is also not clear how the students’ feeling not to be heard by the society and the university (lines 542 ff.) or the feeling of insecurity (lines 571 ff.) is related to ragging. It is surely an important aspect, especially in the life of minorities but the authors should help readers to understand why these feelings and experiences may lead to ragging or may cause some students to accept ragging or to deny it. This should happen at least in the Discussion

(d) I would recommend to display “The students’ recommendations” (lines 585 ff.) as a main theme in Figure 2 and to present it as a main theme in the text so that readers can better follow your complete analysis and identification of themes.

4. The Discussion needs much more structure. You should start with a short and precise “summary of main findings”, no longer than 8 to 10 lines. I would suggest to stress the aspect of ambiguity or ambivalence towards ragging as the most important aspect (at least for me). The first sentence (lines 611 f.) Is superfluous; the last sentence (lines 617 ff. should be moved to the "Strength and Limitations" section in the Discussion. After the short summary you could go on with three major sections perhaps clearly marked with a subheading:

- Why ragging is positively perceived?

- Why ragging is negatively perceived?

- The wider context of ragging: Sri Lanka and its university culture

(this is nothing nothing more than a suggestion; I think you have better ideas.)

In any case, it is important that the reader recognizes a clear structure and a clear line of arguments.

5. I like your theoretical model of violence displayed in Figure 1, but I see two problems. I miss an “integration” as you claim with the Figure. Some arrows in the Figure and the pure statement “structural violence, intersectionality and social dominance theories are intricately linked” in the text (line 144) are not an integration. Moreover, you should use this model in a more creative way to explain ragging in societies like Sri Lanka. For example, as far as I understand, you say Sri Lanka is a violent country and unsatisfactory conditions contribute to student violence (line 657 f.). I agree, but one could ask, how? You say, ragging is violence and at the same time, ragging seems to be protest against inequalities and violence of the society. It is also remarkable that it is not the upper-class students (or only a few) who practice ragging but those at the other social end. Therefore, I would very much appreciate if you make a second attempt to use the model for an explanation.

Some minor concerns:

6. In addition to reference 22, you may also refer to this just published study that shows the strong association of ragging and suicide: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35025905/

7. Did you attach the COREQ statement for qualitative studies and did you fill in the page numbers, as requested?

8. Line 399: One or two examples how seniors named juniors could be helpful to better understand this humiliating procedure.

9. It would be generally helpful to give more examples (in form of an Appendix) how ragging is executed. It reminded me of practices and rituals of student leagues (“Burschenschaften) in Germany. Here, too, the younger ones have to be servants of the older students, are treated very badly, much alcohol is on the way and for some student leagues it is a special pleasure to hurt one another, using swords and, thus, to demonstrate masculinity. These practices are well known and also documented via media so that we have a very good idea of these rituals. Perhaps you have also some material to present examples in an Appendix that makes ragging easier imaginable for Non-Sri Lanka people.

10. Line 729 ff. Of course, the practices you describe here are humiliating women. But please, consider that it can also be a hard expectation towards male students to behave in such an inhuman way. I do not want to exonerate males from accusations but some of them may also feel in a dilemma.

11. Line 785: I agree with your last plea but, following the students’ experiences, should it not read that it needs deep reforms in the university and the society to successfully combating ragging?

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 08 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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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.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Wolfgang Himmel

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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PONE-D-21-15111R3“When a person can’t obey, he is subjected to violence”; a qualitative study on students perceptions on the phenomenon of ragging at a Sri Lankan universityPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Wickramasinghe,

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.

==============================

From my point of view, the manuscript has clearly gained in structure, methodological clarity and explanatory power. Before the final acceptance of the paper and publication, I would like to suggest a number of changes and additions, which you hopefully appreciate:

1. It was a good idea to change the title, especially since the previous title was difficult to understand for readers who are unfamiliar with the background of Sri Lanka. However, I’m afraid, readers will also have problems to understand the meaning of the new title and its association with ragging, apart from the fact that “he” in the title is suboptimal and “(s)he” is not accurate … What do you think about including the topic of ‘power’ in the title, for example this way:

“Ragging as an expression of power in a deeply divided society — a qualitative study on students’ perceptions of ragging at a Sri Lankan university”

You may even find a better alternative. Please, consider, I’m a non-native speaker …

2. Although you tried to adapt the Abstract to the new version, it reflects the manuscript only to a limited degree. For example, main themes and sub themes are not well presented in the Abstract; also, the Discussion in the paper is not represented in the Abstract.

First of all, I would suggest to structure the Abstract with the help of the usual subheadings, i.e., Introduction, Methods and so on.  Please be aware, PlosOne allows 300 words (you have currently about 250 words).   

The last two sentences of the Abstract are very similar, so one of them could be deleted. Instead, there would be some more room for 1 or 2 sentences of a "Discussion ". Moreover, to be more precise, I would suggest to change one of the reported results in the Abstract this way:

INSTEAD:

The findings revealed how students used ragging as an expression of power to initiate order and as a way to express dissatisfaction towards social inequalities occurring within the larger society as well as facilitate bonds between university students.

BETTER:

The findings revealed how students used—or perceived—ragging very differently: as an expression of power to initiate order or as a way to express dissatisfaction towards social inequalities occurring within the larger society or to facilitate bonds between university students.

3. line 117: the word “ragging” is missing, isn’t it? (my “lines” always refer to the ‘clean’ version.)

4. For me, the lines 120 to 127 are crucial because they present and justify the Aim of the Study. However, I do not find the passage completely convincing and could imagine the following passage instead, based mainly on regrouping the sentences:

INSTEAD:

It is increasingly imperative to address this serious public health problem that profoundly affects all students, not only victims but also perpetrators and by-standers. Ragging has a potential deleterious impact upon society’s younger generations and their university years intended for building intellectual capacity. Educating youth in a safe space is essential, particularly for its subsequent contributions towards the country’s future. The aim of this study was to explore the perceptions of students concerning the phenomenon of ragging, and to understand how ragging affects student life and culture at the University of Jaffna.

BETTER:

Educating the youth in a safe space is essential, particularly for their subsequent contributions towards the country’s future. It is increasingly imperative to address this serious public health problem from the students’ perspective and to understand how it affects all students, not only victims but also perpetrators and by-standers. Since ragging has a potentially deleterious impact upon society’s younger generations and their university years intended for building intellectual capacity. The aim of this study was to explore how students perceive ragging and how ragging affects student life and culture at the University of Jaffna.

You may even find better alternatives …

5. From the history of the submission, I know that the chapter “Theoretical lenses” was desired by the reviewers for the Introduction. Although interesting, it may surprise the reader at this point, because after the formulation of the Aim of the Study, the Methods chapter is expected. That said, it would be much wiser to present the Theoretical lenses right there, namely in the Methods chapter, preferably starting at line 227 ff. What do you think?

While moving the Theoretical lenses into the Methods chapter, you should make it a bit clearer at this point that you used the Theoretical lenses to sensitize yourself for the data analysis. You have already mentioned this very well at the end of the Discussion; however, this argument should (also) come up already at the beginning of the Theoretical lenses chapter so that readers are informed about the significance of this chapter.

6. Due to the many (sub)headings in the Results chapter, it is not always clear which of them are the four main topics. I would therefore simply suggest (for lines 251, 278 etc.) to add: Subtheme 1: …, Subtheme 2: …  etc.

7. Line 283: I would suggest to start the first sentence with: For many students, ragging was part of …

8. Of course, I do not want to go into the details of your analysis. However, the presentation of the themes is still not quite logical in some places — despite the otherwise very successful revision. This is most noticeable in the case of sub-theme 2. For me, there are two very different topics that are shoved into each other here, namely ‘Ragging lies on a wide spectrum’ and ‘ragging is a cyclical event that thereby establishes hierarchies’.

While the lines 283 ff. belong to the ‘spectrum’ topic, lines 288 ff. belong to ‘hierarchy’. Lines 307 ff. deal again with ‘spectrum’ over a rather longer period. Lines 352 ff. then deal with ‘hierarchy’; lines 371 ff. clarify in particular the cyclic character, lines 386 ff. the ‘hierarchy’. Lines 406 ff. again the ‘spectrum’, in this case, the positive side. Lines 417 ff. deal again with the ‘cyclic hierarchies’. This is the way I read/understand your quotes.

I urgently ask you to check here again structure and argumentation thoroughly, as well as the naming of the main topics. Perhaps a fifth sub-theme will be appropriate to avoid the confusion in presenting sub-theme 2. In any case, your terms/themes should be distinctive, convincing and simply to follow for readers. 

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Ragging as an expression of power in a deeply divided society ; a qualitative study on students perceptions on the phenomenon of ragging at a Sri Lankan university

PONE-D-21-15111R4

Dear Dr. Wickramasinghe,

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.

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Kind regards,

Wolfgang Himmel

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Let me say that I appreciated your efforts to constantly improve the manuscript. I hope you also agree that the manuscript is now much clearer in its arguments, easier to read and will evoke a better understanding of Sri Lanka's student culture and the country's structural problems. Thank you!   

Additional journal comments:

This decision was made after a re-evaluation following an appeal to a reject decision issued after a first round of revisions. More information about the appeal process can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/editorial-and-peer-review-process#loc-appeals

Reviewers' comments: