PONE-D-21-22475

How can school help victims of violence? Evaluation of online training for European schools’ staff from a multidisciplinary approach

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Greco,

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Reviewers' comments:

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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

Reviewer #3: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: I Don't Know

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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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 article approaches an extremely relevant topic for the field of Health and Education. Although the intervention is introductory, it is essential training for education professionals, who often feel helpless and with limited knowledge on the subject. Another strong point of the intervention is the performance of a pilot study, which allows the researcher to make the necessary adaptations for the aim study.

For each part of the article, there is a complete description of all the elements required for an empirical study, including ethical recommendations. Data analysis is consistent and appropriate to the study, and the combination of qualitative and quantitative data is adequate for this type of investigation, which addresses the issue of sexual violence, a complex phenomenon.

Below I present my suggestions:

Instruments:

In the Study I, the authors mention that the participants were also asked about several characteristics of the course content and they were invited throughout the interview to make comments or suggestions. I suggest that the authors inform at what point in the research these participants had access to the course content. I also suggest they make it clearer that this study analyses one module of the intervention related to sexual abuse (before the presentation of the goals).

Discussion:

In the first paragraph of the discussion, the authors wrote that the “the present study analyses the views of education staff and female victims of child sexual abuse on the role of the family and school environment in child protection”, different from abstract and introdution. I suggest that the authors standardize the aim of the study.

On line 308, I suggest that the authors inform that the discussion refers to Study I as they wrote at the beginning of lines 337 (Study II), and 366 (Study III).

In the data analysis, the authors mentioned that they extracted 74 fragments (I couldn't check because table 4 is not available for my viewing). However, few results were discussed, especially about the impact of the course (only one paragraph). I suggest that the authors explore this data further in a more in-depth analysis.

Figure and Tables:

- I didn’t have access to the Figure A1, which was provided as supplementary material.

- I didn’t have access to the Tables 2, 3, 4, and 5. Also it is important to mention where the tables 2, 3, and 4 need to be included in the text.

In view of this, I recommend that the authors make the necessary adjustments for the publication of the text.

Reviewer #2: Thank you for an interesting article. The idea of your article is of great importance knowing the number of digital courses and online resources that are developed to support teachers in their encounters with children experiencing violence without being evaluated. We therefore do not know much about these programs’ effectiveness, availability for teachers, and to what extend they meet the teachers’ and the victims’ needs. Your design is creative and well explained. The article would benefit from a theoretical framework to provide a deeper analysis of the data and a more thorough discussion. For the meantime, the discussion part is more or less descriptive than discussive.

Reviewer #3: This interesting work focuses on a topic of interest in the areas of health, education and psychology, and has the following objectives: to analyze how victims of sexual abuse during childhood remember the school's role in their lives at the time, to try to find out what helped them and what made it harder for them; to assess the potential of an online training course (SAVE) developed at European level, through the feedback given by school staff members and victims of child sexual abuse; to assess schools’ potential in the prevention, detection and reporting of child victimization through changes that the staff of educational centers would include in their everyday practice as a result of the course; and to test to what extent the actions proposed by school staff members meet the needs described by victims regarding the school's role when they suffered child sexual abuse. The online course used and called SAVE was created by a partnership of five European entities, which gives an important packaging to the contribution of this research.

In general, the article is well written and articulated. The review of the scientific literature carried out by the authors to support the work seems correct and pertinent to me, and at the same time I consider that the theoretical introduction is of quality, although I recommend that previous teacher training and intervention programs be reviewed in greater depth in matters of maltreatement and abuse, because there are very interesting contributions both nationally and internationally that are not named in the article.

The description of the methodological part is complete regarding the procedure. The authors could add more data about the samples and the instrument used.

The results are well structured and interesting. It is very commendable that authors have been able to articulate three studies to give a joint response to the objectives of interest. However, and unfortunally, I could not accurately evaluate this section since in the information offered to me are missed the results Tables. The figure that is presented must be improved so that its visualization is more comprehensive and letters and figures do not overlap.

The discussion is also well articulated. The authors could plan to formulate clear hypotheses and organize the discussion around them. Future lines of research are appreciated. It is recommended that the concrete contribution and practical application of the work be highlighted.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Grazielli Fernandes

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Training school staff in victimization - feedback2.pdf

How can school help victims of violence? Evaluation of online training for European schools’ staff from a multidisciplinary approach

PONE-D-21-22475R1

Dear Dr. Greco,

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.

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Kind regards,

Dylan A Mordaunt, MD, MPH, FRACP

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Thank you for your resubmission. This was reassigned to me as academic editor, after involving a different academic editor or process, initially. On the first round, three reviews were received and feedback given that major revisions were required.

The comments made by the authors have been adequately dealt with and this now meets the criteria for publication. With specific reference to the criteria for publication:

1. The report presents the results of original research.

2. Results reported have not been published elsewhere.

3. Experiments, statistics, and other analyses are performed to a high technical standard and are described in sufficient detail.

4. Conclusions are presented in an appropriate fashion and are supported by the data.

5. The article is presented in an intelligible fashion and is written in standard English.

6. The research meets all applicable standards for the ethics of experimentation and research integrity.

7. There are peripherally relevant reporting guidelines, but the authors have included multiple studies, making this an immensely rich report and I don't think further changes to structure would add value.

Reviewers' comments: