Validation of the shortened version of the Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ) using participants from the Dog Aging Project

Vanessa Wilkins; Jeremy Evans; Christina Park; The Dog Aging Project Consortium; Annette L. Fitzpatrick; Kate E. Creevy; Audrey Ruple

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0299973

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionAugust 29, 2023
16 Nov 2023 Decision Letter - Colleen Anne Dell, Editor PONE-D-23-25264Validation of the shortened version of the Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ) using participants from the Dog Aging ProjectPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Ruple, 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. ============================== ACADEMIC EDITOR: REVIEWER #1: This work is very interesting and also very hard as answering to surveys require a lot of time and effort from the owners, and I admire this type of work very much. A few questions arose while going over the work, which I will need some clarity on: Do you have the demographics of the owners who filled out the questionnaire? Such as gender, age, level of education and social class? Do you believe the gender or other characteristics of the owners who responded to the questionnaire could influence their responses? On that same note, I believe if table 1 contained demographic information about the owners, it could reduce possible biases and/or raise new questions. Do you know if the same owners responded to both the long and short questionnaires and if they responded at the same time? I raise this question because the questionnaires are long which could influence the effort the owners put into responding the question towards the end of the survey. On the discussion, I felt the point of the possible reason on aggressiveness was missed. Could it be because the questions are ambiguous and hard to interpret which can be answered in different ways? I also believe it’s relevant to discuss how answers regarding gender and size/type of breed can influence on the animal’s aggressiveness? Is there any type of association already described? Reviewer #2 I think the analysis was performed rigorously and explained in details. I am concerned about the 60% response rate. While the authors did a great job of mentioning it in the limitations, I think more information can be included about why they think this happened, how it may impact the results, and how the authors are going to mitigate the effects. ============================== Please submit your revised manuscript by Dec 31 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). 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List the grants or organizations that supported your study, including funding received from your institution. b) State what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role in your study, please state: “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.” c) If any authors received a salary from any of your funders, please state which authors and which funders. d) If you did not receive any funding for this study, please state: “The authors received no specific funding for this work.” Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 6. We note that you have included the phrase “data not shown” in your manuscript. Unfortunately, this does not meet our data sharing requirements. PLOS does not permit references to inaccessible data. We require that authors provide all relevant data within the paper, Supporting Information files, or in an acceptable, public repository. Please add a citation to support this phrase or upload the data that corresponds with these findings to a stable repository (such as Figshare or Dryad) and provide and URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers that may be used to access these data. Or, if the data are not a core part of the research being presented in your study, we ask that you remove the phrase that refers to these data. 7. One of the noted authors is a group or consortium [The Dog Aging Project Consortium]. In addition to naming the author group, please list the individual authors and affiliations within this group in the acknowledgments section of your manuscript. Please also indicate clearly a lead author for this group along with a contact email address. 8. Please include your full ethics statement in the ‘Methods’ section of your manuscript file. In your statement, please include the full name of the IRB or ethics committee who approved or waived your study, as well as whether or not you obtained informed written or verbal consent. If consent was waived for your study, please include this information in your statement as well. 9. 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 Comments: Dear Authors, The external review on your paper has been completed but two independent academics. I am happy to inform you that your paper is being accepted with minor revisions. Please attend to the specific comments below: REVIEWER #1: This work is very interesting and also very hard as answering to surveys require a lot of time and effort from the owners, and I admire this type of work very much. A few questions arose while going over the work, which I will need some clarity on: Do you have the demographics of the owners who filled out the questionnaire? Such as gender, age, level of education and social class? Do you believe the gender or other characteristics of the owners who responded to the questionnaire could influence their responses? On that same note, I believe if table 1 contained demographic information about the owners, it could reduce possible biases and/or raise new questions. Do you know if the same owners responded to both the long and short questionnaires and if they responded at the same time? I raise this question because the questionnaires are long which could influence the effort the owners put into responding the question towards the end of the survey. On the discussion, I felt the point of the possible reason on aggressiveness was missed. Could it be because the questions are ambiguous and hard to interpret which can be answered in different ways? I also believe it’s relevant to discuss how answers regarding gender and size/type of breed can influence on the animal’s aggressiveness? Is there any type of association already described? REVIEWER #2: I think the analysis was performed rigorously and explained in details. I am concerned about the 60% response rate. While the authors did a great job of mentioning it in the limitations, I think more information can be included about why they think this happened, how it may impact the results, and how the authors are going to mitigate the effects. Please also review the article generally for flow, spelling, grammar, etc. now that it has been a few weeks since it was originally submitted. Thank you, Colleen [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: Yes ****** 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: Yes ****** 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 work is very interesting and also very hard as answering questionnaire require a lot of time and effort from the owners, and I admire this type of work very much. I don´t have any questions about method and statistical analysis, and no other concerns regarding the publication. I think the kappa statistic was a good choice. I just suggest a more robust discussion as detailed comments on the attached file. Reviewer #2: I think the analysis was performed rigorously and explained in details. I am concerned about the 60% response rate. While the authors did a great job of mentioning it in the limitations, I think more information can be included about why they think this happened, how it may impact the results, and how the authors are going to mitigate the effects. ****** 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: Mariana Yukari Hayasaki Porsani 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. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ) using participants from the Dog Aging Project.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299973.r001
Revision 1
9 Feb 2024 Author Response Thank you both for your reviews and comments. Our specific responses follow below. REVIEWER #1: This work is very interesting and also very hard as answering to surveys require a lot of time and effort from the owners, and I admire this type of work very much. Thank you so much for this comment. We are excited to be able to present some of the work we are doing with data collected at the Dog Aging Project. A few questions arose while going over the work, which I will need some clarity on: Do you have the demographics of the owners who filled out the questionnaire? Such as gender, age, level of education and social class? In order to adhere to our IRB exemption, we only collect minimal information about the dog owners. That information includes age categories, highest level of education, and annual income categories. We do not collect any information about sex or gender and owners are able to select “prefer not to answer” for the income question. Do you believe the gender or other characteristics of the owners who responded to the questionnaire could influence their responses? On that same note, I believe if table 1 contained demographic information about the owners, it could reduce possible biases and/or raise new questions. We really appreciate this suggestion. We have added owner demographic information (age, education level, and income) to table 1. Due to the limitations regarding human-level data collection mentioned above, the owner information is categorized and thus would likely limit our ability to infer a great deal from it. However, this could be hypothesis generating for future studies. Do you know if the same owners responded to both the long and short questionnaires and if they responded at the same time? I raise this question because the questionnaires are long which could influence the effort the owners put into responding the question towards the end of the survey. Only owners who completed both versions of the survey were included in this analysis. The short version of the survey was completed first in July of 2020 as part of the HLES survey. The long version of the survey was completed in August of 2020 as a standalone survey. Thus, even though the survey itself was longer, there were no other surveys being completed at the same time. Information about the timing of the survey completions is included in the methods subsection entitled “Study population.” On the discussion, I felt the point of the possible reason on aggressiveness was missed. Could it be because the questions are ambiguous and hard to interpret which can be answered in different ways? I also believe it’s relevant to discuss how answers regarding gender and size/type of breed can influence on the animal’s aggressiveness? Is there any type of association already described? We limited the discussion about the specific results of the surveys as our main purpose was to validate that similar responses can be obtained from owners of dogs with multiple temperament types using either version of the C-BARQ survey (long or short). We felt that an in depth discussion about the causes of aggressiveness in dogs – or really causes of why owners report aggressiveness in dogs – would detract from that purpose. We do agree that there can be misinterpretation of questions, but feel that we have shown that regardless of the accuracy, owners report similar responses using both survey types. REVIEWER #2: I think the analysis was performed rigorously and explained in details. I am concerned about the 60% response rate. While the authors did a great job of mentioning it in the limitations, I think more information can be included about why they think this happened, how it may impact the results, and how the authors are going to mitigate the effects. Thank you so much for taking the time to review this manuscript. We appreciate your effort and comments. We feel that the 60% response rate at the height of the pandemic and pre-vaccine was acceptable, but agree that we needed to increase the discussion about that point. The discussion now reads: “Second, while the response rate at nearly 60% was acceptable, particularly given the timing of the survey request in relation to world events, the potential for non-response bias is worth mentioning. For instance, it could be that participants that were not able to complete the long version of the C-BARQ survey were those who were no longer under quarantine restrictions in place due to the pandemic and thus their dogs may have been experiencing a shift in their daily routine that could have led to less agreement between survey responses than within the population who was able to complete both surveys.” Please also review the article generally for flow, spelling, grammar, etc. now that it has been a few weeks since it was originally submitted. Thank you – we hope that it reads smoothly, but are happy to adjust as needed! Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299973.r002
20 Feb 2024 Decision Letter - Colleen Anne Dell, Editor Validation of the shortened version of the Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ) using participants from the Dog Aging Project PONE-D-23-25264R1 Dear Dr. Audrey Ruple, 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, Colleen Anne Dell, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299973.r003
Formally Accepted
2 Apr 2024 Acceptance Letter - Colleen Anne Dell, Editor PONE-D-23-25264R1 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Ruple, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, 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. Colleen Anne Dell Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299973.r004

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