Development of the Italian version of the Orgasmic Perception Questionnaire (OPQ)

Marta Panzeri; Denise Mauro; Lucia Ronconi; Ana Isabel Arcos-Romero

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0288850

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMarch 14, 2023
3 May 2023 Decision Letter - Asia Mushtaq, Editor PONE-D-23-07333Development of the Italian version of the Orgasmic Perception Questionnaire (OPQ)PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Panzeri, 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 June 15, 2023 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. 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(Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: Dear editor thank you for your invitation to review manuscript entitled “Development of the Italian version of the Orgasmic Perception Questionnaire (OPQ)” Comment 1: Authors need to be explaining application development of the Orgasmic Perception Questionnaire (OPQ) in health primary care or healthy setting and if a person had a bad score or had a problem in one of its aspect, what intervention can be taken for it. Comment 2: Please provide more information regarding scoring Orgasmic Perception Questionnaire (OPQ) (minimum and maximum) Comment 3: Please the term of 63-item in whole manuscript. Reviewer #2: Review assignment for PONE-D-23-07333 1. The introduction is too long. It is better to be shorter 2. Please explain more about step 1 of the study and how to remove a large number of questions due to the equidistribution pattern by mentioning the reference to the equidistribution pattern. 3. Instead of using the term study 1, 2, and 3, use the term stage 1, 2, and 3. Because all the steps are part of a single study, the 3 studies are not separate. For the same reason, the code of ethics should be written for the entire study once because it is a single code. 4. In each part of the study, the descriptive characteristics of the participants are boringly explained in the text. It is better to report the descriptive characteristics of the participants of each stage of the study in a table. 5. The details of accessing the samples in public places and online and inviting them to participate in the study should be explained. 6. How was the sample of 674 selected for exploratory factor analysis? 7. How were “I prefer not to reply” answers managed during data analysis? Were samples with this answer excluded from the analysis? 8. Using other factor extraction methods, such as principal axis factoring or unweighted least squares, is better than the PCA method. Because PCA does not attempt to explain the underlying population factor structure of the data and makes the often, unrealistic, assumption that each variable is measured without error. 9. The percentage of explained variance for the designed questionnaire is low (39.83%). What solution to improve this number is considered by the researchers? Is the communality of the items checked? Removing variables with communality less than 0.5 may improve the variance 10. It is not correct to perform t-test and correlation test to check test-retest reliability. Suitable tests should be replaced. 11. In Table 4, the sensations factor is not written 12. In the abstract, it is written that the score of women is higher than that of men for only 2 factors, while in line 397, it is written the score of women was higher than that of men for all the factors. Be checked 13. What is the reason for choosing the BIDR questionnaire for divergent validity? 14. Convergent validity and correlation results between OPQ and ORS questionnaire factors in the entire sample and by gender were reported in the text, which is very long and boring and can be converted into a table. 15. Face and content validity has not been quantitatively investigated. It is better to check and report CVI and CVR indicators. 16. The article is very detailed and long and the contents are sometimes repetitive. For example, Cronbach's alpha has been explained in several places. The article can be made shorter by converting a part of the results into a table, removing duplicate and redundant content, and rewriting the article. ****** 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? 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Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288850.r001
Revision 1
9 Jun 2023 Author Response Dear Editor and Reviewers: Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity of improving our manuscript entitled “Development of the Italian version of the Orgasmic Perception Questionnaire (OPQ)”. We highly appreciate all your comments and recommendations, as well as the positive feedback received and the good evaluation of the paper. We would like to thank you for your consideration of this manuscript. We have highlighted the changes in yellow within the revised document. The result section needs careful revision, specifically reporting of in EFA-factor loadings of all scale items, scree plot etc. Response: We inserted 3 new tables (Table 1, 3 , and 7) and unified info in the result section, revising it. We reported EFA-factor loadings in the “supporting information” file in Table 1S: Reviewer #1: Dear editor thank you for your invitation to review manuscript entitled “Development of the Italian version of the Orgasmic Perception Questionnaire (OPQ)” Response: We would like to thank this reviewer for the overall appreciation of our manuscript. We hope that we have addressed all the comments to their satisfaction. Comment 1: Authors need to be explaining application development of the Orgasmic Perception Questionnaire (OPQ) in health primary care or healthy setting and if a person had a bad score or had a problem in one of its aspect, what intervention can be taken for it. Comment 2: Please provide more information regarding scoring Orgasmic Perception Questionnaire (OPQ) (minimum and maximum) Response: Thanks for raising this very interesting point. We added: “Even if the OPQ is not meant to be a clinical assessment tool, it may be used in clinical settings to explore the orgasmic perception of the patient, in a qualitative more than quantitative way. We do not propose a cut-off or minimum and maximum values, since subjective orgasm descriptions vary considerably both across individuals and on different occasions by the same individuals (43). The clinician can explore with the patient the reason for a potential "bad" score and perform either a psychoeducational intervention or sex therapy depending on the cause (inadequate sexual stimulation, anxiety, sociocultural and generational expectations, etc.).” Comment 3: Please the term of 63-item in whole manuscript. Response: We changed the wording throughout the paper to "63-item”. Reviewer #2: Review assignment for PONE-D-23-07333 Response: We would like to thank this reviewer for their overall appreciation of our manuscript. We hope that we have addressed all their comments to their satisfaction. 1. The introduction is too long. It is better to be shorter Response: We agree with this comment, and we deleted both the parts concerning instruments irrelevant to this study and the part about neuroimaging 2. Please explain more about step 1 of the study and how to remove a large number of questions due to the equidistribution pattern by mentioning the reference to the equidistribution pattern. Response: Thanks for raising this point. We clarified the reason of our methodological choice adding: “We choose to not use quantitative content validity measures since we wished that the selection would be performed by data analysis and not by experts: there are still too many biases on orgasm that according to us would not allow experts to judge objectively. Moreover, we wished to select items that could represent different ways to experience orgasm more than items that represent how most people experience it, and that could emerge only from laypeople's judgment.” And we quoted: DeVellis R. F. (2017). Scale development, theory and applications. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA. 3. Instead of using the term study 1, 2, and 3, use the term stage 1, 2, and 3. Because all the steps are part of a single study, the 3 studies are not separate. For the same reason, the code of ethics should be written for the entire study once because it is a single code. Response: Thanks for this suggestion: we substituted the term study with the term stage, unifying data on participants, Cronbach's alpha, and the ethical committee code. 4. In each part of the study, the descriptive characteristics of the participants are boringly explained in the text. It is better to report the descriptive characteristics of the participants of each stage of the study in a table. Response: Thank you for this suggestion, we now did this in Table 1. 5. The details of accessing the samples in public places and online and inviting them to participate in the study should be explained. Response: We added: “(…) through personal contacts or calls on social media” 6. How was the sample of 674 selected for exploratory factor analysis? Response: We specified that 25 participants were eliminated since they omitted more than 10% of the OPQ items. 7. How were “I prefer not to reply” answers managed during data analysis? Were samples with this answer excluded from the analysis? Response: This was true only for socio-demographical questions, so we just calculate the percentages of socio-demographical data on the total sample. We added: “socio-demographical data are not available for the whole sample (see Table 1).” We found no reason for excluding these participants. Important information such as age or gender was reported by each participant . 8. Using other factor extraction methods, such as principal axis factoring or unweighted least squares, is better than the PCA method. Because PCA does not attempt to explain the underlying population factor structure of the data and makes the often, unrealistic, assumption that each variable is measured without error. Response: We run a principal axis EFA, that gave different results. 9. The percentage of explained variance for the designed questionnaire is low (39.83%). What solution to improve this number is considered by the researchers? Is the communality of the items checked? Removing variables with communality less than 0.5 may improve the variance Response: Thank you very much for this suggestion. Now the EFA explains 44% of the variance. Considering communality > .50 would have left us with only 15 items. Since globally the 5 factors and the selected items made sense to us, we decided to consider items with communality > .20. 10. It is not correct to perform t-test and correlation test to check test-retest reliability. Suitable tests should be replaced. Response: According to our knowledge, t-test and correlation are usually used to check test-retest reliability (see DeVellis R. F. (2017). Scale development, theory and applications. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.) 11. In Table 4, the sensations factor is not written Response: thank you for noticing it: we added it. 12. In the abstract, it is written that the score of women is higher than that of men for only 2 factors, while in line 397, it is written the score of women was higher than that of men for all the factors. Be checked Response: We added: “with an adequate effect size” 13. What is the reason for choosing the BIDR questionnaire for divergent validity? Response: The BIDR, due to its psychometric properties and characteristics, is the usual questionnaire used for assessing divergent validity since it measures different constructs from the ones we are studying and it is validated in Italian. 14. Convergent validity and correlation results between OPQ and ORS questionnaire factors in the entire sample and by gender were reported in the text, which is very long and boring and can be converted into a table. Response: We did it, please see Table 7 15. Face and content validity has not been quantitatively investigated. It is better to check and report CVI and CVR indicators. Response: We added: “We choose to not use quantitative content validity measures since we wished that the selection would be performed by data analysis and not by experts: there are still too many biases on orgasm that according to us would not allow experts to judge objectively. Moreover, we wished to select items that could represent different ways to experience orgasm more than items that represent how most people experience it, and that could emerge only from laypeople's judgment.” 16. The article is very detailed and long and the contents are sometimes repetitive. For example, Cronbach's alpha has been explained in several places. The article can be made shorter by converting a part of the results into a table, removing duplicate and redundant content, and rewriting the article. Response: Thank you for this very helpful suggestion. We did it. Marta Panzeri and coauthors Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Rebuttal Letter.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288850.r002
6 Jul 2023 Decision Letter - Asia Mushtaq, Editor Development of the Italian version of the Orgasmic Perception Questionnaire (OPQ) PONE-D-23-07333R1 Dear Dr. Marta Panzeri 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, Asia Mushtaq, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288850.r003
Formally Accepted
19 Jul 2023 Acceptance Letter - Asia Mushtaq, Editor PONE-D-23-07333R1 Development of the Italian version of the Orgasmic Perception Questionnaire (OPQ) Dear Dr. Panzeri: 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. Asia Mushtaq Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288850.r004

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