PONE-D-22-26621Determinants of knowledge, attitude and self-efficacy towards complementary feeding among rural mothers: Baseline data of a cluster-randomized control trial in South West Ethiopia

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Gizaw,

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.

During internal evaluation of your mansucript, we have noted that you have submitted highly similar article which is currently under consideration entitle ‘’Breastfeeding knowledge, attitude, and self-efficacy among mothers with infant and young child (0-24 months): Baseline data of a cluster-randomized control trial in South West Ethiopia’’

In addition to the reviewer’s comments, we would require that you cite and discuss the above mentioned related paper in the body of the manuscript (introduction, methods if overlap in participants and discussion). In particular, please discuss how the current mansucript contributes to the basis of academic knowledge in light of the above-mentioned mansucript. Please bear in mind that our publication criteria state " If a submitted study replicates or is very similar to previous work, authors must provide a sound scientific rationale for the submitted work and clearly reference and discuss the existing literature. Submissions that replicate or are derivative of existing work will likely be rejected if authors do not provide adequate justification.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Lucinda Shen

Staff Editor 

on behalf of 

Mohan Kumar

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: 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: Yes

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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: 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: The authors have made a very good effort overall to describe their findings. However, some areas they further need to address.

Abstract:

Keywords: pls keep it in alphabetical order.

Introduction is overall well written, and although as the authors stated there are

poor knowledge about appropriate foods and feeding practices is often a determinant of inappropriate infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices, can the authors provide results on attitude on complementary feeding from middle and/or low income countries?

Methods:

Sample

Sufficient details were not provided on the sampling approach for the recruitment of participants. Please provide sufficient detail.

Authors stated “All selected mothers were invited to a meeting in their nearby health posts and farmer training centers”. Pls mention response rate.

Data collection and measurements

This paragraph seems confusion to readers “Components of the attitude towards complementary feeding consisted of 8 items with a five-point Likert scale, rating maternal attitude towards complementary feeding translated from English. that assessed: giving a variety of meals and feeding frequency”. Pls re-write.

Components of complementary feeding knowledge, attitude and self- efficacy described well, however, tools as complementary file may helpful. Who involved in data collection? How confidentiality were ascertained as authors mention “All selected mothers were invited to a meeting in their nearby health posts and farmer training centers”.

How birth weight are recorded. From hospital records or anything else..??

Results

Table 1: Child sex-Bold.

Pls mention whether responses for “Sources of information” are multiple response or mutually exclusive. Omit cell with zero values.

Results are difficult to read and follow (especially the regression analyses) and overall, not explained correctly. Also, grammatical errors are present.

Discussion: although brief, the discussion adequately compares and explains the results in relation to other studies. The notion of collective measures as an intervention is appropriate but further explanation/ description would be helpful, particularly for readers working in similar environments. Furthermore, it would be useful to know about the efficacy of such interventions in other parts of Ethiopia or other countries such as countries.

Reviewer #2: This article has investigated the level and determinants of maternal knowledge, attitude and self efficacy toward complementary feeding.

- definition of complementary feeding had not been described in the abstract.

- In the discussion, this sentence needs a revision – “This study also revealed that factors that determines complementary feeding knowledge. Mother who had secondary school and above had higher mean knowledge score. This may be explained by the fact that mothers with formal educational background can understand the nutrition message disseminated by health professionals or other sources of information.” – In fact, the study did not reveal that mothers who had secondary school are more likely to understand the nutrition message. In the discussion it would be interesting to learn how to approach the most vulnerable mothers to understand the message.

- “Similarly, mothers who had four and more (=4 visits) ANC visits were high knowledge score. This may be explained with the fact mothers exposed to the nutrition education and counselling during their visits.” – this information should be discussed in further detail, for instance explaining how was the ANC visit and describe the reasons for effectiveness when four or more visits had been carried out.

- “This finding is below study conducted in North West Ethiopia (51%) [18] and Assosa, Ethiopia [28].” – this sentence needs to be reviewed.

- “However, the limitation of the study is that the finding of the study will not be generalizable to the urban setting.” – it should be described the limitations o the design study as a community-based cross-sectional study – such as reverse causality, misclassification bias, selection bias and confounding.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Jitendra K. Singh

Reviewer #2: Yes: Airton Tetelbom Stein

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PONE-D-22-26621R1Determinants of knowledge, attitude and self-efficacy towards complementary feeding among rural mothers: Baseline data of a cluster-randomized control trial in South West EthiopiaPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Gizaw,

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 20 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,

Mohan Kumar

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments:

Kindly provide a point to point detailed response to reviewer comments, highlighting the modification done, page and line numbers.

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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: 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 #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: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: In the abstract:

It has not been addressed the following topics: How data had been collected?, Which are the variables being compared? It is not described the two groups that had been compared.

This sentence needs to be reviewed: "Except for the child’s sex and age, no significant difference was observed between the intervention and control groups in terms of socio-demographic variables (p > 0.05)." - There is a need to present a confidence interval for the variables that had been identified as statistically significant.

In the discussion there is a need to present the synthesis of the main results found in this study.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Dr. Jitendra Kumar Singh

Reviewer #2: Yes: Airton Tetelbom Stein - Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre and Conceicao Hospital of Porto Alegre

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[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.

Determinants of knowledge, attitude and self-efficacy towards complementary feeding among rural mothers: Baseline data of a cluster-randomized control trial in South West Ethiopia

PONE-D-22-26621R2

Dear Dr. Gizaw,

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,

Jennifer Tucker, Staff Editor, on behalf of

Abdu Oumar

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Whilst reviewer 2 has provided additional comments alongside their decision, these are not required revisions for your manuscript.

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

**********

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: There is a need to present the possibility of misclassification bias which was not described in the discussion section.

The first paragraph of discussion should present the main results of the present study.

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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.

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 #2: Yes: Airton Tetelbom Stein

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