PONE-D-21-25685Parents’ awareness, knowledge, and experiences of play and its benefits in child development: a systematic review protocolPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Dhas,

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.

When revising your manuscript please ensure your address fully the reviewers' comments regarding the selection criteria, in particular those regarding the difference in play between infants and adolescents, and the timescale of the articles to be included given changes in parenting behavior over time.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does the manuscript provide a valid rationale for the proposed study, with clearly identified and justified research questions?

The research question outlined is expected to address a valid academic problem or topic and contribute to the base of knowledge in the field.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Is the protocol technically sound and planned in a manner that will lead to a meaningful outcome and allow testing the stated hypotheses?

The manuscript should describe the methods in sufficient detail to prevent undisclosed flexibility in the experimental procedure or analysis pipeline, including sufficient outcome-neutral conditions (e.g. necessary controls, absence of floor or ceiling effects) to test the proposed hypotheses and a statistical power analysis where applicable. As there may be aspects of the methodology and analysis which can only be refined once the work is undertaken, authors should outline potential assumptions and explicitly describe what aspects of the proposed analyses, if any, are exploratory.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

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3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception, at the time of publication. 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: No

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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

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above and, if applicable, provide comments about issues authors must address before this protocol can be accepted for publication. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about research or publication ethics.

You may also provide optional suggestions and comments to authors that they might find helpful in planning their study.

(Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The manuscript presents a registered report protocol for a systematic review on parents’ awareness, knowledge, competence and experiences of play. In addition, the authors aim to compare these between parents of children with disabilities and parents of typically developing children. The proposed study is original and should be of interest for the field. Although it is widely accepted that play has a major role in human development, the influence of parental variables has often been neglected in this research field.

I have a few general comments for the authors that I feel should be addressed before the manuscript is further considered for peer review:

Introduction

In general, although very briefly described, the theoretical background presented does point well towards the main research question. However, I think that some more general descriptions of the main concepts would be helpful to lay the foundation for the Methods section. For example, it remains unclear what the authors refer to as “play” and which developmental stage the authors refer to. It is quite obvious that the quality and quantity of children’s play (and thus also parents attitudes towards and their roles in it) will change dramatically throughout development. This is has to be described and the authors have to find a way to account for these developmental transitions in their study, either by focusing on a specific developmental stage or by taking “age” into account as a study variable. Furthermore, the introduction mentions parent’s awareness, knowledge, and competence as the main outcome variables. However, in the methods section (and abstract) it seems that four variables are included: awareness, knowledge, competence and experience. The title, on the other hand, only mentions “awareness, knowledge, and experiences”. This should be resolved and the introduction should mention and explain the main study variables in more detail. The introduction also lacks a particular motivation for the comparison between parents of children with disabilities (again: what do the authors mean here?) and parents of typically developing children.

Methodology

The description of participants states that parents with “children” above 18 years of age will be excluded. Despite the fact that a 17-year-old is barely referred to as a “child” (but rather as an adolescent), the theoretical background presented seems to be focused on children’s play, and not of adolescents. Thus, the authors have to explain why studies with adolescents should be included in the literature review and, if so, have to adapt the theoretical background in order to capture the developmental transition of play from infancy to adulthood.

Some more minor comments:

1. The types of studies included does not exclude previous reviews or meta-analyses – how do the authors go about these studies?

2. What is the reason to search in five different databases and to have three different independent reviewers?

3. The authors state as a limitation that “...since there are numerous terminologies used to describe play and parents’ understanding of it some relevant studies could potentially be missed”. This is why it is important that the authors state their conceptualization of “play” in the introduction and explain in the Methods section how they apply this definition in the literature search.

I hope that the above suggestions help the authors to improve the manuscript.

Reviewer #2: The authors have presented their plan for a systematic review of parents' knowledge, competence, awareness, and experience of play with their children. This is an important and interesting topic that will benefit from their review.

I have some concerns regarding the current plan that I think need to be reconsidered.

- The age range of the children is too broad. Play between parents and infants/toddlers/pre-schoolers/children/teenagers are all wildly different. Including all ages will confound the results and make interpretations difficult. I would recommend reducing the age range.

- The primary outcomes are on important topics, but it is unclear how they will be operationalised, especially given that the secondary outcome is to identify if there are any measures that exist to measure these constructs.

- The planned year range to be searched is too broad. Parenting has changed dramatically even in the last 10 years. Including any study ever published, as appears to be the plan as outlined in the search strategy, will confound the results.

- The authors talk about parents throughout the proposal. Parenting, and especially play, has been shown to be very different for mothers and fathers. This needs to be taken into consideration when collecting and presenting the data and research findings.

- There are some minor grammatical errors that need revising.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Parents’ awareness, knowledge, and experiences of play and its benefits in child development: a systematic review protocol

PONE-D-21-25685R1

Dear Dr. Dhas,

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,

Emily Freeman

Guest Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

I would like to acknowledge that I participated as a reviewer for the intitial evaluation of this manuscript. Both myself, and the additional reviewer were satisfied with the changes made in response to our intial reviews.

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does the manuscript provide a valid rationale for the proposed study, with clearly identified and justified research questions?

The research question outlined is expected to address a valid academic problem or topic and contribute to the base of knowledge in the field.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

2. Is the protocol technically sound and planned in a manner that will lead to a meaningful outcome and allow testing the stated hypotheses?

The manuscript should describe the methods in sufficient detail to prevent undisclosed flexibility in the experimental procedure or analysis pipeline, including sufficient outcome-neutral conditions (e.g. necessary controls, absence of floor or ceiling effects) to test the proposed hypotheses and a statistical power analysis where applicable. As there may be aspects of the methodology and analysis which can only be refined once the work is undertaken, authors should outline potential assumptions and explicitly describe what aspects of the proposed analyses, if any, are exploratory.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception, at the time of publication. 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

**********

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

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above and, if applicable, provide comments about issues authors must address before this protocol can be accepted for publication. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about research or publication ethics.

You may also provide optional suggestions and comments to authors that they might find helpful in planning their study.

(Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have done a great job addressing my comments. I would therefore recommend to accept the manuscript for publication.

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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

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