Social media addiction and emotions during the disaster recovery period—The moderating role of post-COVID timing

Dewan Muhammad Nur –A Yazdani; Tanvir Abir; Yang Qing; Jamee Ahmad; Abdullah Al Mamun; Noor Raihani Zainol; Kaniz Kakon; Kingsley Emwinyore Agho; Shasha Wang

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0274898

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionFebruary 5, 2022
13 Apr 2022 Decision Letter - Barbara Guidi, Editor PONE-D-22-03615Social media addiction and emotions during the disaster recovery period – The moderating role of post-COVID timing.PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Nur -A Yazdani, 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. The referees require a MAJOR REVISION of your paper. If you are prepared to undertake the work required, I would be pleased to reconsider my decision. However, I would like to ask you to very carefully address the issues raised by the referees and revise your paper accordingly. Please submit your revised manuscript by May 28 2022 11:59PM. 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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: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: 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: No ****** 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: No ****** 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: In this paper, the authors describe the impact of social media addiction during the COVID pandemics. The paper is well written, and contains relevant finding. I have some suggestions for the authors: - Avoid using wording like "present" when you talk about a specific point in time (in few years, it is no more "present"), but instead use the actual year (2022). - The formulation of Hypothesis 6 is unclear. To begin with, you probably meant "over time", because "overtime" is a noun and it does not fit well in each sentence. Additionally, I don't get what the sentences like "the relationship between anxiety and social media addiction will be more substantial overtime;" mean. Do you mean that the relationships you identified in the previous hypotheses will get stronger over time? Or maybe do you mean that "if you become more anxious you will become more addicted to social media"? I think you should state the hypothesis in a much clearer way. - I think the hypotheses should be part of the framework, to give it the correct importance in the paper. - Consider citing the following paper: Nasti, Lucia, Andrea Michienzi, and Barbara Guidi. "Discovering the Impact of Notifications on Social Network Addiction." International Symposium: From Data to Models and Back. Springer, Cham, 2020. I think you will find the findings shown in this paper relevant to your work. Reviewer #2: Thank you for the opportunity to read this manuscript about problematic social media use during the COVID pandemic. I appreciate the efforts made by the authors to recruit this sample, as the sample size is remarkable. However, there is much work to do to improve this paper. - I encourage the authors to move away from the addiction framework in presenting findings related to problematic social media use PSMU. Authors recommend a dose of skepticism towards the idea that frequent social media use might indicate a disorder or even only a mere symptom of a different primary condition (see, for a summary, Casale & Banchi, 2017). I also encourage the authors to cite the conceptualization of PSMU that you use - The authors argue that social media addiction leads to psychological and physical consequences (e.g., lines 86-95). However the vast majority of the cited studies used cross-sectional designs which do not allow to draw causal inferences. _ Please, check the following sentence: "social media usage hours have been found to be strongly associated with creating social media addiction. Also consider that the correlation between time spent on social media and problematic social media use has been often found to be low. - H1 and H2 deal with the link between anxiety/fear and PSMU. A lot of previous studies focused on this link, but the authors did not present them in their introduction. - H3: social media addiction increases with social media usage hours. However, Figure 1 shows the opposite direction - In order to test H4 and H5 the authors should have adopted a longitudinal design. I encourage the authors to reformulate their hypotheses by recplacing "increase" with "is correlated with". Similarly, the authors should not use terms as "independent" and "dependent" variables as they did not use an experimental design. - There is no need to provide a definition of "conceptual framework". - The Method section paragraphs should be presented in the following order: 1. Participants. 2. Measures 2. Procedure. 4. Ethics. 5. Statistical analyses. - The Measures (including the psychometric adaptation of their versions in Bangladesh) should be better described. Provide the name for IDS-15 and SMD. Why the authors also used the GPIUS? I was not able to find information about the measures used to assess anxiety and fear. - Table 2: " à" ? - The authors should then provide: descriptive statistics; bivariate correlations among the study variables; results from the SEM. There is no need to present results separately by each week. Moreover, the SEM results are not properly reported. - It is impossible to evaluate the discussion section until the data are properly analyzed. In any case, the Discussion section is full of not-relevant sentences (e.g., lines 454-463). By the way, the authors found that women are less addicted to social media than men. This result is in contrast with previous findings (see for a meta-analysis Su et al., 2020) and interpretation should be provide. ****** 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. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: 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.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. 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Revision 1
29 Jul 2022 Author Response Editorial Team July 2022 Manuscript ID: PONE-D-22-03615 “Social media addiction and emotions during the disaster recovery period – The moderating role of post-COVID timing” Dear Editor-in-chief, Thank you for allowing us to revise and re-submit our manuscript. We are incredibly grateful for your insightful feedback that has strengthened our manuscript. We have addressed all the comments raised by the 1st reviewer in the revised version of the manuscript. All changes made to the revised manuscript have been in track changes. Below, we provide a point-by-point response to the comments and linked our responses to the appropriate sections in the revised manuscript. We hope that the revisions made have properly addressed the concerns, and that our revised manuscript is acceptable for publication in the journal. Reviewer 1 In this paper, the authors describe the impact of social media addiction during the COVID pandemics. The paper is well written, and contains relevant finding. I have some suggestions for the authors: Comment Feedback 1 Avoid using wording like "present" when you talk about a specific point in time (in few years, it is no more "present"), but instead use the actual year (2022). ---Done. The Section was revised. 2 The formulation of Hypothesis 6 is unclear. To begin with, you probably meant "over time", because "overtime" is a noun and it does not fit well in each sentence. Additionally, I don't get what the sentences like "the relationship between anxiety and social media addiction will be more substantial overtime;" mean. Do you mean that the relationships you identified in the previous hypotheses will get stronger over time? Or maybe do you mean that "if you become more anxious you will become more addicted to social media"? I think you should state the hypothesis in a much clearer way. ---The sentences were modified with the word ‘over time’ in space of ‘overtime’. 3 I think the hypotheses should be part of the framework, to give it the correct importance in the paper. ---The hypotheses were replaced under the framework. 4 Consider citing the following paper: Nasti, Lucia, Andrea Michienzi, and Barbara Guidi. "Discovering the Impact of Notifications on Social Network Addiction." International Symposium: From Data to Models and Back. Springer, Cham, 2020. I think you will find the findings shown in this paper relevant to your work. ---The information from the paper was added to the manuscript and the reference list has been updated. Reviewer 2: Thank you for the opportunity to read this manuscript about problematic social media use during the COVID pandemic. I appreciate the efforts made by the authors to recruit this sample, as the sample size is remarkable. However, there is much work to do to improve this paper. Comment Feedback 1 I encourage the authors to move away from the addiction framework in presenting findings related to problematic social media use PSMU. Authors recommend a dose of skepticism towards the idea that frequent social media use might indicate a disorder or even only a mere symptom of a different primary condition (see, for a summary, Casale & Banchi, 2017). I also encourage the authors to cite the conceptualization of PSMU that you use. ---References has been shown for the conceptualization of the PSMU used in the study. 2 The authors argue that social media addiction leads to psychological and physical consequences (e.g., lines 86-95). However the vast majority of the cited studies used cross-sectional designs which do not allow to draw causal inferences. ---This argument was supported by many articles cited within the manuscript especially from 55 – 67 in the references. 3 Please, check the following sentence: "social media usage hours have been found to be strongly associated with creating social media addiction. Also consider that the correlation between time spent on social media and problematic social media use has been often found to be low. ---Done. The sentence was restructured and correlation was shown. 4 H1 and H2 deal with the link between anxiety/fear and PSMU. A lot of previous studies focused on this link, but the authors did not present them in their introduction. ---More references has been added to support hypotheses H1 and H2. 5 H3: social media addiction increases with social media usage hours. However, Figure 1 shows the opposite direction ---H3: Social media addiction are associated with social media usage hours. 6 In order to test H4 and H5 the authors should have adopted a longitudinal design. I encourage the authors to reformulate their hypotheses by recplacing "increase" with "is correlated with". Similarly, the authors should not use terms as "independent" and "dependent" variables as they did not use an experimental design. ---The word ‘increases’ was replaced with ‘is correlated with’. Also the terms "independent" and "dependent" variables were changed as per the discussion. 7 There is no need to provide a definition of "conceptual framework". ---Done. The Section was revised. 8 The Method section paragraphs should be presented in the following order: 1. Participants. 2. Measures 2. Procedure. 4. Ethics. 5. Statistical analyses. ---The method section was restructured. 9 The Measures (including the psychometric adaptation of their versions in Bangladesh) should be better described. Provide the name for IDS-15 and SMD. Why the authors also used the GPIUS? I was not able to find information about the measures used to assess anxiety and fear. ---We have provided some information about the IDS-15 and SMD and why the GPIUS was used. Furthermore the measures used to assess anxiety and fear was also indicated within the manuscript and marked in yellow. 10 Table 2: " à" ? ---Corrected. 11 The authors should then provide: descriptive statistics; bivariate correlations among the study variables; results from the SEM. There is no need to present results separately by each week. Moreover, the SEM results are not properly reported. ---Agreed and we have produced Heterotrait-Monotrait Ratio (HTMT)correlation matrix and SEM results are now properly written. 12 It is impossible to evaluate the discussion section until the data are properly analyzed. In any case, the Discussion section is full of not-relevant sentences (e.g., lines 454-463). ---The mentioned paragraph in the discussion section is revised as per the theme of the study. 13 By the way, the authors found that women are less addicted to social media than men. This result is in contrast with previous findings (see for a meta-analysis Su et al., 2020) and interpretation should be provide. ---This finding of the study has been justified this with proper references. Comments to the Author Feedback 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: Partly 2 Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: 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: No 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: No Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers letter_Manuscript ID-PONE-D-22-03615.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274898.r002
7 Sep 2022 Decision Letter - Barbara Guidi, Editor Social media addiction and emotions during the disaster recovery period – The moderating role of post-COVID timing. PONE-D-22-03615R1 Dear Dr. Nur -A Yazdani, 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, Barbara Guidi 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 ******** 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: (No Response) ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: (No Response) ****** 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 Response) ****** 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 Response) ****** 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: All comments have been addressed, therefore I recommend to publish the paper when the editor thinks so ****** 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 ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274898.r003
Formally Accepted
12 Oct 2022 Acceptance Letter - Barbara Guidi, Editor PONE-D-22-03615R1 Social media addiction and emotions during the disaster recovery period – The moderating role of post-COVID timing. Dear Dr. Nur -A Yazdani: 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. Barbara Guidi Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274898.r004

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