Access to support services for individuals who experience intimate partner violence during stressful life events (SLEs) in high-income countries: Protocol for a scoping review

Dina Idriss-Wheeler; Ziad El-Khatib; Sanni Yaya

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0277903

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJune 9, 2022
19 Aug 2022 Decision Letter - Guangyu Tong, Editor PONE-D-22-16705 Access to support services for individuals who experience intimate partner violence during stressful life events (SLEs) in high-income countries: A protocol for a scoping review PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Idriss-Wheeler, 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 Sep 15 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. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. 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. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Guangyu Tong Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. 3. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. Additional Editor Comments: This protocol has been reviewed by both a scoping review expert and a subject matter expert. Please address the comments accordingly. In particular, the connection between the scope and the instrument/data extraction tool they proposed. The COVID context is emphasized in the writing but almost never appeared in the data collection plan, which needs to be fixed/clarified. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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 ******** 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 Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable? Descriptions of methods and materials in the protocol should be reported in sufficient detail for another researcher to reproduce all experiments and analyses. The protocol should describe the appropriate controls, sample size calculations, and replication needed to ensure that the data are robust and reproducible. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: 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: No Reviewer #2: 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 Reviewer #2: 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: Thanks for inviting me to review this manuscript. It is well-written and easy to understand. I only have a few minor comments. Table 2: The exclusion criteria under “Design” are not types of study designs but the types of research? From lines 225 to 228, “For this review, the focus is on high-income countries because the scoping review is part of (and to inform) a larger study looking at access to both informal (family, friends, neighbours) and formal violence against women (VAW) supports for individuals who experienced IPV during COVID-19 lockdowns in Canada.” Could the authors clarify a little bit more about the role of “COVID-19” in this review? It has been mentioned multiple times in the background section. From the inclusion and exclusion criteria and data extraction form, I feel that the authors are looking at not only COVID-19 but other types of context, such as Disaster, emergency, and economic recession? Table 3, item 8, authors mentioned that “a summary of the qualitative data through a descriptive analysis of the content will be provided”. How about quantitative outcomes? Will there be any numerical summaries? It would be great if the authors would have a draft version of data extraction form to share. Table 3, item 8, “Outcomes that are quantitatively or qualitatively described by the studies as related to access barriers and facilitators to informal and formal support services.” How about “Quantitatively or qualitatively outcomes that were measured in the studies to access barriers and facilitators to informal and formal support services.” In Table 4, the “Lessons learned” seems to be quite an open-ended summary. I am not a content expert, but I feel it might be very challenging to summarize it concisely as different studies could I have very different “lessons learned”. I can imagine that barriers might be more or less similar across studies, but the lessons learned can be very specific to a particular area, a subpopulation, or under a certain situation, etc. I feel the authors may provide a bit more details about what they are particularly looking for. Reviewer #2: This is an important area of research and I commend you on this work. Please find some feedback re. each section that may help improve the manuscript. Abstract: excellent and objectives and methods are clearly outlined. Introduction: the sentence in line 85 could be better linked to the previous one. It appears to be an add-on. It was great to see the relevant literature being comprehensively and coherently introduced. I recommend that you also explain the theoretical framework that this review will adopt. There is a brief mention of disaster social science. Perhaps this approach to accessing support during SLEs could be adopted and explained further. In relation to the study objectives, something you may want to consider is: how to minority ethnic groups in high income countries access support during SLEs? Of course, this is not compulsory and only a suggestion - due to the various barriers that ethnic minority groups may experience. Method: In line 180, I think you meant MEDLINE? In Table 1, search term 2, I also recommend you include: family violence. For the 'informal' concepts, also consider including "community". For the context, define 'high-income countries' earlier in the paragraph. Discussion: Excellent. ****** 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 Reviewer #2: Yes: Lata Satyen ******** [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. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277903.r001
Revision 1
14 Sep 2022 Author Response Thank you for the opportunity to submit a revised manuscript. Please see response to reviewer and editor comments below. Additional Editor Comments: This protocol has been reviewed by both a scoping review expert and a subject matter expert. Please address the comments accordingly. In particular, the connection between the scope and the instrument/data extraction tool they proposed. The COVID context is emphasized in the writing but almost never appeared in the data collection plan, which needs to be fixed/clarified. RESPONSE: Thank you for your comment. We have revised the protocol accordingly to ensure the instrument/data extraction tool proposed is properly connected to the scope of the review. We have revised both the context section [p. 12 ; lines 271-280 ], Table 2 eligibility criteria [p. 13 ], and Table 3 [p.14 ]. Reviewers' comments: 4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete? Reviewer #1: No RESPONSE: Please note that this is a scoping review protocol and we have indicated that once completed, “Findings will not only be disseminated through academic journals, but they will also be disseminated to knowledge users who are partners in the larger project (i.e., violence against women organizations and associations).” [Page 17 - lines 389-391]. Reviewer #1: Thanks for inviting me to review this manuscript. It is well-written and easy to understand. I only have a few minor comments. RESPONSE: Thank you for your comment. Table 2: The exclusion criteria under “Design” are not types of study designs but the types of research? RESPONSE: Thank you for your question. We have revised accordingly and changed it to types of evidence sources (as suggested by the JJBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis on page 417). [p13] Source: Peters MDJ, Marnie C, Tricco AC, Pollock D, Munn Z, Alexander L, et al. Updated methodological guidance for the conduct of scoping reviews. JBI Evid Implement [Internet]. 2021 Mar [cited 2022 Apr 21];19(1):3–10. Available from: http://journals.lww.com/ijebh/Fulltext/2021/03000/Updated_methodological_guidance_for_the_conduct_of.2.aspx From lines 225 to 228, “For this review, the focus is on high-income countries because the scoping review is part of (and to inform) a larger study looking at access to both informal (family, friends, neighbours) and formal violence against women (VAW) supports for individuals who experienced IPV during COVID-19 lockdowns in Canada.” Could the authors clarify a little bit more about the role of “COVID-19” in this review? It has been mentioned multiple times in the background section. From the inclusion and exclusion criteria and data extraction form, I feel that the authors are looking at not only COVID-19 but other types of context, such as Disaster, emergency, and economic recession? RESPONSE: Thank you and we agree. We have revised the context section and clarified as suggested. [p.10; lines 271-280] Table 3, item 8, authors mentioned that “a summary of the qualitative data through a descriptive analysis of the content will be provided”. How about quantitative outcomes? Will there be any numerical summaries? It would be great if the authors would have a draft version of data extraction form to share. RESPONSE: Please note that Item 8 indicates that both quantitative and qualitative outcomes will be extracted and analyzed. The line “a summary of the qualitative data through a descriptive analysis of the content will be provided” is immediately after we indicate that Frequency counts (quantitative data) of key concepts, population s and relevant results/outcomes that we come across will be conducted. As this is a scoping review and more of an exploratory review method, it is difficult to provide a draft of the data extraction form due to the heterogeneity of what we will come across; once we review the literature, we will summarize the findings accordingly. [p.14/15] Table 3, item 8, “Outcomes that are quantitatively or qualitatively described by the studies as related to access barriers and facilitators to informal and formal support services.” How about “Quantitatively or qualitatively outcomes that were measured in the studies to access barriers and facilitators to informal and formal support services.” RESPONSE: Thank you for your suggestion; we have revised the sentence accordingly. [p.14] In Table 4, the “Lessons learned” seems to be quite an open-ended summary. I am not a content expert, but I feel it might be very challenging to summarize it concisely as different studies could I have very different “lessons learned”. I can imagine that barriers might be more or less similar across studies, but the lessons learned can be very specific to a particular area, a subpopulation, or under a certain situation, etc. I feel the authors may provide a bit more details about what they are particularly looking for. RESPONSE: Thank you, we agree and have revised the manuscript accordingly. We are looking for lessons learned and recommendations from the experiences of individuals who experienced violence during stressful events attempting to access informal or formal supports, as well as from service providers who delivered services during these times [p. 15; lines 330-332]. Reviewer #2: This is an important area of research and I commend you on this work. Please find some feedback re. each section that may help improve the manuscript. Abstract: excellent and objectives and methods are clearly outlined. RESPONSE: Thank you for your comment. Introduction: the sentence in line 85 could be better linked to the previous one. It appears to be an add-on. It was great to see the relevant literature being comprehensively and coherently introduced. RESPONSE: Thank you for your comment; we have revised the sentence accordingly. [p.3; lines 97-98] I recommend that you also explain the theoretical framework that this review will adopt. There is a brief mention of disaster social science. Perhaps this approach to accessing support during SLEs could be adopted and explained further. RESPONSE: Thank you for your suggestions. We have added the conceptual frameworks guiding our work. [p. 7; lines 174-186]. In relation to the study objectives, something you may want to consider is: how to minority ethnic groups in high income countries access support during SLEs? Of course, this is not compulsory and only a suggestion - due to the various barriers that ethnic minority groups may experience. RESPONSE: Thank you for your suggestion and we agree; this has now been incorporated [p.8; lines 205-206]. Method: In line 180, I think you meant MEDLINE? RESPONSE: Thank you, yes. We have revised from MEDILINE to MEDLINE [p.8; line 220] In Table 1, search term 2, I also recommend you include: family violence. RESPONSE: Thank you. We have revised to include family violence [p. 9, Table 1]. For the 'informal' concepts, also consider including "community". RESPONSE: Thank you. We have revised to include community in search [p. 9, Table 1]. For the context, define 'high-income countries' earlier in the paragraph. RESPONSE: Thank you. We have revised to clarify high-income countries as classified by the World Bank Group; provided a link and reference with the URL for the list [p.6; line 169-170]. Discussion: Excellent. RESPONSE: Thank you very much for your comment. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf RESPONSE: Thank you. We have revised the manuscript to meet PLOS ONE’s style requirements, including file naming. 2. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information RESPONSE: Thank you. We have revised the supporting information files as suggested (renamed and added a caption at the end of the manuscript after the reference list). [p.22] 3. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. RESPONSE: Thank you. We have checked for retracted articles and we have none in our reference list. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277903.r002
6 Nov 2022 Decision Letter - Guangyu Tong, Editor Access to support services for individuals who experience intimate partner violence during stressful life events (SLEs) in high-income countries: protocol for a scoping review PONE-D-22-16705R1 Dear Dr. Idriss-Wheeler, 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, Guangyu Tong Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): 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? Descriptions of methods and materials in the protocol should be reported in sufficient detail for another researcher to reproduce all experiments and analyses. The protocol should describe the appropriate controls, sample size calculations, and replication needed to ensure that the data are robust and reproducible. 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: Thanks for making all the suggested changes. The authors have addressed all my comments. I do not have more comments. ****** 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.0277903.r003
Formally Accepted
11 Nov 2022 Acceptance Letter - Guangyu Tong, Editor PONE-D-22-16705R1 Access to support services for individuals who experience intimate partner violence during stressful life events (SLEs) in high-income countries: protocol for a scoping review Dear Dr. Idriss-Wheeler: 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. Guangyu Tong Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277903.r004

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .