PONE-D-22-08667Motivational factors were more important than perceived risk or optimism for compliance to infection control measures in the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemicPLOS ONE

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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

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: 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 relationship between optimism and compliance to infection control measures has been investigated previously by at least two studies (Hartmann, M., & Müller, P. (2022). Acceptance and Adherence to COVID-19 preventive measures are shaped predominantly by conspiracy beliefs, mistrust in science and fear - A comparison of more than 20 psychological variables. Psychological Reports. doi: 10.1177/00332941211073656; Jovančević, A., & Milićević, N. (2020). Optimism-pessimism, conspiracy theories and general trust as factors contributing to COVID-19 related behavior – A cross-cultural study. Personality and Individual Differences, 167, 110216. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.110216). The results from these (and possibly other) previous studies should be integrated in the introduction and discussion of results.

On p. 4, the authors argue that self-interested concern for your own well-being is a central motivation for compliance. This is certainly true, but what about the motivation to care for others, e.g., because many friens belong to the risk group, or if a person has a pronounced (pro)social behaviour? Also the big 5 trait agreeableness may play a role (Hartmann & Müller, 2022). Some of this is mentioned on p. 6, this could be integrated a bit better, also to avoid some redundancies in 1.1.2 and 1.1.3.

Optimism is a complex issue. The authors mention that optimism is likely to be associated with lower risk perception and lower compliance to preventive measures. However, also the attitude of whether the measures or compliance will be effective determine actual compliance. The authors well addressed these different possible facets of optimism. For this study, I was wondering whether it would not have been of importance to differentiate optimism also for their measurements (e.g., general optimism that things come out well for you, optimism of dealing with infection, and optimism of the effect of compliance to the preventive measures. Why did the author not measure these different facets?

1.4.2 the hypothesis regarding information gathering is difficult to understand when the reader does not know how “information gathering” is operationalized. For example, “only trusting sources they find credible and trusting the official information” is ambiguous. Some may find sources of fake news and conspiracies very credible, then a reverse association with perceived risk may be expected. Please clarify at this point whether the measurement focuses on official information gathering.

p. 9 “the reported symptoms make it less likely that they had in fact been infected by the coronavirus”. This is a rather speculative statement. There are many infected people that “only” had such described symptoms without high fever. The author shuld at least report some references to support such a statement.

Analysis.

Given that the subsample of participants with confirmed infections was too low for separate analysis, they should probably be excluded from the analysis. Also, the people without confirmed infections might differ in terms of motivation. This should be captured by a covariate “infected”, or alternatively also this subsample could be removed from the analysis.

I was surprised that the compliance measure included items about trusting the infection control measure. Such items rather capture attitude and not directly compliance in terms of actual adherence to measurements. The differentiation between attitude and behaviour was discussed in the introduction but seem to be ignored for the study.

p. 15 “most trusted the pandemic information” -> the “official” information is meant here, right?

Did the author test for possible covariates for the regression analyses? For example, compliance might be higher for older people (or particularly for people in the risk group). Was there any health-related information about the participants as to whether they belong to the risk group (preconditions)? These people possibly have a higher compliance that may be independent from optimism etc. Or do you think this is sufficiently captured by higher perceived risk? Maybe this issue should be discussed somewhere more explicitly.

In addition to reporting F-statistics, the authors could provide a summary graph of their hypothesis where the relevant regression estimates and their 95%Cis are depicted.

Reviewer #2: The authors report data collected during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic from a large Norwegian sample. Overall, I find the study well conducted. In particular, hypotheses were pre-registered and results are clearly reported and carefully discussed in the manuscript. To make it brief, I am very much in favor of seeing this manuscript published. I only have three comments:

1. Please show figures depicting the main regressions (or correlations). I would be very much interested in seeing the distributions of the measured variables. In some cases, there might be floor or ceiling effects (or heavily skewed distributions) that would affect the interpretation.

2. What are the relationships between the questions in one category, i.e., between the items grouped into the five variables in Table 1? Cronbach’s alpha would be a standard measure. For some items, the authors discuss specific effects but it would be generally important to see if the categorization of these items is warranted (based on the obtained empirical data).

3. The text is very clearly written with one exception. The term optimism is used in different circumstances. Sometimes it is used as a short form for “optimism regarding the risks of COVID-19.” Sometimes it is used as a more general measure. It is also a bit confusing in some cases how “optimism” is different from “optimism bias.” The authors could simply provide a table that lists the different usages of these terms and then stick to these throughout the manuscript (including the title and the abstract).

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Motivational factors were more important than perceived risk or optimism for compliance to infection control measures in the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic

PONE-D-22-08667R1

Dear Dr. Sætrevik,

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,

Ali Safaa Sadiq

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Authors could manage to address all the given comments by the reviewers, hence, I would like to recommend their manuscript for the possible publication.

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

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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

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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

**********

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)

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If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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