Poorer subjective mental health among girls: Artefact or real? Examining whether interpretations of what shapes mental health vary by sex

Susan P. Phillips; Fiona Costello; Naomi Gazendam; Afshin Vafaei

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295704

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionAugust 13, 2023
13 Oct 2023 Decision Letter - Soumitra Das, Editor PONE-D-23-25576Poorer subjective mental health among girls: artefact or real? Examining whether interpretations of what mental health means vary by sex.PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Vafaei, 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 revise as per the suggestions by reviewers Please submit your revised manuscript by Nov 27 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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We notice that your supplementary tables are included in the manuscript file. Please remove them and upload them with the file type 'Supporting Information'. Please ensure that each Supporting Information file has a legend listed in the manuscript after the references list. 8. 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 If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references.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 If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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 ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: I Don't Know ****** 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: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 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 ****** 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: Thank you for allowing me to review the manuscript. I would like to commend the authors for their diligent work on this fascinating study. The paper addresses the paradox of why girls report lower self-rated mental health (SRMH) while displaying higher well-being in other areas. The research question is straightforward, and the authors acknowledge that their response is only partial. Utilizing a large and diverse sample of Canadian youth makes their findings more relevant to the broader population. The authors utilize a well-validated measure of self-reported mental health, ensuring the reliability and accuracy of their conclusions. However, their methodology, combining survey data and qualitative analysis, requires additional information on validity and reliability. The discussion explores possible explanations for the findings and recognizes their complexity. The conclusions partially answer the research aims, backed by both results and references. The study's limitations, such as sampling bias and data gaps, provide opportunities for future research. Although the study's conclusions are partially consistent with the presented evidence, they lack concrete empirical evidence to support their potential explanations. Consequently, the observed paradox remains unexplained, emphasizing the need for more research with a more diverse and representative sample, utilizing qualitative and quantitative data to deepen our understanding. Reviewer #2: As with most observational studies, a conclusion is hard to draw due to the challenges relating to the statistical analyses and inherent flaws. So well done for submitting this manuscript! There are some areas of improvement, namely the grammar/writing style particularly with the use of compounded sentences in the background of abstract, and the colloquial style in the 2nd and 3rd paragraph on page 4. Consider revising "girls' determination of their actual relationship with family or friends may be perceived as, or may actually be much less positive than is the case for boys" (on page 14) - this is a rather clunky statement, suggest splitting into 2 sentences and the avoiding using "much less positive" due to the ambiguity. Consider "less positive" or "more negative" instead. You did not explain the rationale behind repeating the factor analyses in specifically in the age groups of 13-16 and 17-18 separately. I am not sure if you analysed the gender difference within respective age groups noting that girls are generally more mature than their boys counterparts at earlier ages. It appears there is less variation in the average component scores in the older age group compared to the younger age group in Figure 2. Again it will be good to show any difference in the SRMH scores of the different age groups. ****** 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? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: Yes: Anil Bachu Reviewer #2: Yes: Cecilia Xiao ******** [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.0295704.r001
Revision 1
14 Nov 2023 Author Response Review of PONE-D-23-25576 Poorer subjective mental health among girls: artefact or real? Examining whether interpretations of what mental health means vary by sex. 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: Thank you for allowing me to review the manuscript. I would like to commend the authors for their diligent work on this fascinating study. The paper addresses the paradox of why girls report lower self-rated mental health (SRMH) while displaying higher well-being in other areas. The research question is straightforward, and the authors acknowledge that their response is only partial. Utilizing a large and diverse sample of Canadian youth makes their findings more relevant to the broader population. The authors utilize a well-validated measure of self-reported mental health, ensuring the reliability and accuracy of their conclusions. However, their methodology, combining survey data and qualitative analysis, requires additional information on validity and reliability. Response: Most surveys collect subjective responses to questions as does ours. There is no objective ‘truth to which these can be compared. For example, self rated health, perhaps the most frequent question in health surveys is a subjective measure. We differentiate survey responses to pre-determined scales or choices from true, qualitative research. Our survey had no questions where a narrative response (which could be considered qualitative) was an option. The options from which participants could choose were those that appeared in previous research, which we have referenced. We hope that our explanation of this (in methods) was clear enough: Guided by existing evidence as to individual and social circumstances that determine adolescent mental health we developed a list of circumstances that participants have been thought to consider while rating their mental health and asked them directly how important each was for this rating via a 4-point scale from ‘not important at all’ to ‘very important’. The main categories of such circumstances included, family (e.g., relationship with parents, family’s access to money) [25], peer relationships (e.g., how my peers treat me) [14], personal factors (e.g., future plans, self-acceptance) [25], community involvement (e.g., being part of my community) [26], health behaviors (e.g., exercise routine) and physical health (e.g., physical activities). [27] The discussion explores possible explanations for the findings and recognizes their complexity. The conclusions partially answer the research aims, backed by both results and references. The study's limitations, such as sampling bias and data gaps, provide opportunities for future research. Although the study's conclusions are partially consistent with the presented evidence, they lack concrete empirical evidence to support their potential explanations. Consequently, the observed paradox remains unexplained, emphasizing the need for more research with a more diverse and representative sample, utilizing qualitative and quantitative data to deepen our understanding. A great summary – thanks. We acknowledge that the ‘paradox’ remained unexplained and added a short sentence at the end of the manuscript for further research directions. _____________________________________________________________________________ Reviewer #2: As with most observational studies, a conclusion is hard to draw due to the challenges relating to the statistical analyses and inherent flaws. So well done for submitting this manuscript! There are some areas of improvement, namely the grammar/writing style particularly with the use of compounded sentences in the background of abstract, We have edited the abstract - Fixed, we hope! and the colloquial style in the 2nd and 3rd paragraph on page 4. Done as well. Consider revising "girls' determination of their actual relationship with family or friends may be perceived as, or may actually be much less positive than is the case for boys" (on page 14) - this is a rather clunky statement, suggest splitting into 2 sentences and the avoiding using "much less positive" due to the ambiguity. Consider "less positive" or "more negative" instead. We agree that that whole paragraph was ‘clunky’ and have tried to fix it. You did not explain the rationale behind repeating the factor analyses in specifically in the age groups of 13-16 and 17-18 separately. The main rationale -identical to our rationale for sex-disaggregated analysis- was identification of possible differences in extracted domains across age groups. Please see page 10. I am not sure if you analysed the gender difference within respective age groups noting that girls are generally more mature than their boys counterparts at earlier ages. It appears there is less variation in the average component scores in the older age group compared to the younger age group in Figure 2. Again it will be good to show any difference in the SRMH scores of the different age groups. A very valid point that could potentially add clarity to the observed paradox, thank you. Following your suggestion, we repeated the factor analysis in four groups (boys 13-16 years; girls 13-16 years; boys 17-18 years; and girls 17-18 years) mostly to compare average component scores and found no new information beyond the individual effects of sex or age. A paragraph explaining this analysis is now added to the manuscript (page 14) as well as an appendix figure. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewer_PONE-D-23-25576.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295704.r002
28 Nov 2023 Decision Letter - Soumitra Das, Editor Poorer subjective mental health among girls: artefact or real? Examining whether interpretations of what mental health means vary by sex. PONE-D-23-25576R1 Dear Dr. Vafaei, 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, Soumitra Das Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295704.r003
Formally Accepted
5 Dec 2023 Acceptance Letter - Soumitra Das, Editor PONE-D-23-25576R1 Poorer subjective mental health among girls: artefact or real? Examining whether interpretations of what shapes mental health vary by sex. Dear Dr. Vafaei: 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 customercare@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. Soumitra Das Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295704.r004

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