PONE-D-22-14363Assessing the Role of Collectivism and Individualism on COVID-19 Beliefs and BehaviorsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Mehta,

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.

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Abbas Al Mutair

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

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: Partly

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?

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

Reviewer #2: No

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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

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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: This article provides an interesting perspective into the challenges and experiences of Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. The manuscript explores perceptions of behaviours and attitudes that how certain collective or individualistic orientations might foster less or more mask use. This paper has potential but needs major revision to be considered.

1. The structure of the paper is abnormal. Various areas in the literature review at unconventional and do not follow typical social science articles. Please follow typically PLoS ONE articles.

2. This literature is incomplete and does not include reviews of some important collectivism-mask papers that have made important contributions.

Lu et al., 2021 PNAS,

English & Li 2021 Frontiers in Psychology

English et al., 2022 Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology

3. Methodology has major weaknesses. While it is important to recognize the low response rate as there were more than 3,000 participants surveyed, but only 283 participants completed the survey. Second, I am confused by the role of the interview study. While I value mixed method approaches, I am uncertain what value or contribution it makes in the study.

Please clarify.

4. It remains how this study at FSU can be generalized to the US population. Florida represents a special state that has taken an a unique path in combating the coronavirus. Authors must reframe their conclusions and interpretations with caution given the local context. In fact, authors might was to conduct further analyses to explain where people are from might have an interactive effect on their attitudes.

Authors should post their Data and code on OSF with a permanent link. Not a wordpress site.

Reviewer #2: Review: Assessing the role of collectivism and individualism on COVID-19 Beliefs and Behaviors

The study addresses the important question of what factors of the U.S. culture have contributed to the significant impact of the pandemic by means of a qualitative and quantitative study of Florida State University faculty, staff and students. Specifically, the study measured their perceptions of the pandemic, their behaviors and how these practices were tied to beliefs of individualism and collectivism. The authors found that collectivist orientations were associated with larger adherence to preventive measures, greater concern for infecting others, and higher trust in medical professionals.

The authors claim that their aim would be to study the U.S. response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. I do not think that such a claim can be made with such a small and non-representative sample. In fact, the relatively small and non-representative sample (University population) is a big limitation of the study, this should already be mentioned in the introduction so that the readers can adapt their expectations accordingly.

Also, the proportion of Republican was rather small (12%), which limits conclusions about political associations. These limitations should be discussed more explicitly.

I was also wondering why the second paragraph of the introduction summarises the results, this should be reported in the results section.

Regarding the background information, I found that the style of writing addresses quite a specific readership (antropology?). As a social scientist, I had a hard time reading this paragraph and understanding what this study is about. To make the study more accessible, I suggest that the authors focus more strongly on information that is relevant for the current research question, and devote more time to studies that addressed similar questions.

For example, there are many studies that addressed how individual differences and political attitudes shape the perception of the pandemic and the preventive behaviour, some of them also focusing on individualism vs. collectivism. The introduction does not sufficiently take these previous studies into account and the scientific merit of the current study remains unclar without properly link the present study to previous research. Some examples are presented below.

Analysis:

I am not sure whether it make sense to run a logistic regression with n=251 for vaccinated when 93% of people were vaccinated. If anything, the authors should consider a zero-inflated logistic regression model (with vacc recoded as zero).

It should be explained explicitly why age was included in Model 1 but gender in Model 3 (I think it makes sense but it should be explained).

Table 3: it should be specified in the table notes what _cons means.

Table 4: it should be specified in the table notes what femalefm and _cons means.

Figure 3: Figure captions are missing; it should for example be specified what “Other” means.

There is a strange style of the references.

Some examples of suggested references that should be cited:

Earnshaw, V. A., Eaton, L. A., Kalichman, S. C., Brousseau, N. M., Hill, E. C., & Fox, A. B. (2020). COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, health behaviors, and policy support. Translational Behavioral Medicine, 10(4), 850–856.

Gratz, K. L., Richmond, J. R., Woods, S. E., Dixon-Gordon, K. L., Scamaldo, K. M., Rose, J. P., & Tull, M. T. (2021). Adherence to social distancing guidelines throughout the COVID-19 pandemic: The roles of pseudoscientific beliefs, trust, political party affiliation, and risk perceptions. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 55(5), 399–412.

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, 00332941211073656;

Maaravi, Y., Levy, A., Gur, T., Confino, D., & Segal, S. (2021). “The tragedy of the commons”: How individualism and collectivism affected the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontiers in public health, 9, 627559.

Rajkumar, R. P. (2021). The relationship between measures of individualism and collectivism and the impact of COVID-19 across nations. Public Health in Practice, 2, 100143.

Šrol, J., Ballová Mikušková, E., & Čavojová, V. (2021). When we are worried, what are we thinking? Anxiety, lack of control, and conspiracy beliefs amidst the COVID‐19 pandemic. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 35(3), 720–729)

Xiao, W. S. (2021). The Role of collectivism–individualism in Attitudes toward compliance and Psychological responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 600826.

Zajenkowski, M., Jonason, P. K., Leniarska, M., & Kozakiewicz, Z. (2020). Who complies with the restrictions to reduce the spread of COVID-19?: Personality and perceptions of the COVID-19 situation. Personality and individual differences, 166, 110199.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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PONE-D-22-14363R1Assessing the Role of Collectivism and Individualism on COVID-19 Beliefs and BehaviorsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Mehta,

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 Dec 31 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,

Angelo Moretti, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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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.

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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: (No Response)

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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

**********

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: I support the publication of this manuscript. It has improved substantially. I would ask the authors to revise their title to into "in the Southeastern United States" because I believe a lot of key findings are very context specific to Florida. This will also be valuable for future readers who will ponder the unique COVID response in Florida as early as May 2020. It is important to note that college represents a diverse group of students and teachers who might share different opinions and attitudes from local authorities who removed mask policies at that time. It might be worth expanding on this as well.

Reviewer #2: I think the article improved greatly in the revised version.

There are still some remaining issues which should be improved:

- There is a section in the introduction with the title “Previous research on COVID-19 and the U.S. Social and Political Response”. What is listed in this four short review paragraphs is only a very small snapshot of what has been researched on this topic, and it was not clear to my how the author selected the content. I think the title of the paragraph does not match the content. The authors should state explicitly at the beginning of this section that they selected some results that they think are relevant for the present research, or the title of the paragraph should me more specific.

- A formal definition of collectivism and individualism should be provided

- At the end of the introduction, the authors list some more research questions (is political affiliation related to COVID-19 safety behaviors; relationship between collectivism and trust in science). The authors should at least briefly introduce these questions with the idea behind it and the relevant references that addressed these questions already.

- The first paragraph of the results section summarizes/discusses all relevant interpretations of the results. This is unusual, the results should be reported first.

- A substantial part of the discussion contains results. The structure should be improved. The discussion should start with discussing the results of the main question, not with additional results

- There should be a participant section in the method section, where one can read number and demographic information (age, gender) of the participants for the different surveys. Were there really only 11 participants who conducted the semi-structured interview? Such limitations should also be mentioned in the discussion section.

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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.

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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. 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.

Assessing the Role of Collectivism and Individualism on COVID-19 Beliefs and Behaviors in the Southeastern United States

PONE-D-22-14363R2

Dear Dr. Mehta,

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,

Angelo Moretti, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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