PONE-D-23-01109Urban-rural inequalities and spatial arrangement of informed choice of FP in Ethiopia: further analysis of 2016 Ethiopian demographic health survey.PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Tareke,

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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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

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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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

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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: Review Comments to the Author

Using 2016 EDHS data the authors assessed urban-rural inequalities and spatial arrangement of informed choice of family planning in Ethiopia. The paper reported that spatial configuration of not informed choice was clustered and magnitude of informed choice was 12 percent higher in urban residents compared to rural residents.

Title:

It is not recommended to use abbreviation on the title: so better you write full form.

Abstract: correct editorial error such as not capitalizing the first letter of new sentence and capitalizing the middle word ‘’Descriptive’’. The same editorial issues are there under discussion.

This sentence is incomplete and what authors want to say is not clear -More specifically, place of FP offers i.e., private health facilities (-16%), listening to the radio programs (+12%), age 35 to 49 years (-9.3%) and 25 to 34 years (+9.2%) (p<0.05.

Check grammar for the following sentence:

In this study, visit private health facilities, women’s age group between 25 to 39 and visit to health facilities in the last 12 months factors that significantly widen urban - rural gap of family planning.

You said: Besides, the spatial arrangement of not informed choice of family planning is not regular. To express spatial distribution the term random/non-random vs clustered are better rather than using not regular.

Introduction:

Check grammar issue in the following sentence:

•Informed choice of family planning means that when women choose a family planning methods, all available information regarding side effects, what to in case of side effects, and possible alternative methods

•Write full form followed by abbreviations in bracket first time abbreviations appear in manuscript

Check grammar issue in the following sentence:

•Moreover, the current study identified the spatial distribution and identified hotspots areas where women who had uninformed family planning choices.

Methods:

•Even if the authors used secondary data some sections of methods were absent. Please add subsections on study area, design, population and data source

•Editorial issue: don’t capitalize letters in the middle of the sentence “Visit”

Results:

•In figure 1 title mention time component, you can use Year EDHS was released. Similarly for table 1 title is incomplete address where and when component.

•Under the following section the authors wrongly cited Figure 1 replace it with Figure 2 because there are no p value in Figure 1 “The spatial arrangement of the uninformed choice of FP”

•Similarly in the paragraph under figure 2, omit figure 2 (wrongly cited)

Discussion

•Check grammar issue in the following sentence:

In this study, being in the age group 35 to 49 years was significantly narrowed the urban and rural gap in the informed choice of family planning where as being in the age group 25 to 34 found to widen the urban -rural gap of family planning compared to age group 15 to 24 year.

•Try to include strength and limitations of this study

Conclusions

•The first sentence is unnecessary

Declarations

You specified only single abbreviations but there are a lot of abbreviations inside document. So include all abbreviations-SNNP, NGO, FP……

References

Some references are too old (16=1996, 24=2007, 28=2001) . Try to use recent publications

Reviewer #2: Dear editors.

Thank you very much for this opportunity to review this paper. This paper assessed urban-rural disparities and spatial distribution of informed choice of FP in Ethiopia, which is crucial for plociy makers and program managers to identify intervention on inequality.

The following are my suggestions for the improvement of this manuscript:

General comments

The authors don't include page numbers and lines in the document, making it difficult to give suggestions and comments by page and line

Make sure to leave space before each bracket or parenthesis

There is typo and spelling error thoughout the document

Introduction.

The introduction part must be rewritten orked and organised in a logical way. The aouthors must highlights what lloks the condition in Africa, then in Ethiopia. Incorporate national family planning strategy and initiatives, as well as health service accessibility and distribution by residence. Describe the efforts and gaps in providing access to quality family planning service to everyone who needs it. It should be discussed that how much govt has spent on family planning and benefit in terms of preventing unintended pregnancy and highrsik fertility behaviors

FP: to be defined first

Method

EDHS is used two stage stratified study design so there is a need for adjustment of cluster and weight while doing multivariate analysis. Need to elaborate the design of the study and whether any type of stratification has been carried out? In addition, the authors did a decomposition analysis but did not elaborate on it in the method section. Which residence coded as “0” or “1”? it need more details

Independent variables

Be consistent, for some variable athors mentioned the coatergy but form sone not yet

Results

Present the frequency of Table 1 by residence, then the total and weighted frequencies are enough.

Decomposition analysis

The authors stated that "the composition factors of region, religion, and place of residence were not included in the multivariable composition analysis because they had a p-value greater than 0.2 at the bivariable decomposition analysis". How could residence be an explanatory variable here? It was an urban-rural disparity study, hence the grouping variable in this case is residence.

In table one, I didn't notice a variable “place for the FP offer” to be classified as government or private, but in the decomposed table, I did?????

Correct the FF typoerror

“in the f informed choice”

“urbanand rural”

“by 9.3%.. Oppositely”

Discusion

It may be helpful to have a short summary of important findings in the first paragraph. The authors did not discuss limitations of the study such as the self-reported nature of the outcome informed choice of FP.

It is surprising that the composition of private health facilities had a narrowing effect, which indicates the composition of private health facilities was higher in rural areas, which is far from reality. Most private health facilities in Ethiopia are concentrated in urban areas.

Conclusion

State the the policy implications of this study based on the finding.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: REVIEWER COMMENT.docx

Attachment

Submitted filename: INF-choice.docx

PONE-D-23-01109R1Urban-rural inequalities and spatial arrangement of informed choice of Family planning in Ethiopia: further analysis of 2016 Ethiopian demographic health survey.PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Tareke,

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 Aug 19 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.

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,

Wudneh Simegn, MSc

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.

Additional Editor Comment:

Author’s contributions form must be corrected as per the journal guideline.

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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 #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 #2: Yes

**********

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

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 #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 #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 #2: Dear Editor, thank you for allowing me to review “Urban-rural inequalities and spatial arrangement of informed choice of Family planning in Ethiopia: further analysis of 2016 Ethiopian demographic health survey”. After I reviewed the revised manuscript, I got that the author/authors had corrected all the raised issue. However, see carefully the age group in the abstract section particularly at result and conclusion section (35 to 49 VS 25 to 39).

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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 #2: No

**********

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Urban-rural inequalities and spatial arrangement of informed choice of Family planning in Ethiopia: further analysis of 2016 Ethiopian demographic health survey.

PONE-D-23-01109R2

Dear Dr. Tareke,

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,

Wudneh Simegn, MSc

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

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