PONE-D-23-35756Political participation among deaf youth in Great BritainPLOS ONE

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PLOS ONE

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The READY study is funded by the National Deaf Children’s Society (UK). The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and not necessarily those of NDCS.

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The READY study is funded by the National Deaf Children’s Society (UK). The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and not necessarily those of NDCS. The full READY research team also includes Dr Garry Squires, Dr Katherine Rogers and Dr Helen Chilton who are co-investigators on this research project. We sincerely thank all deaf young people who took the time to respond to our survey and provide data on their lives. 

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The READY study is funded by the National Deaf Children’s Society (UK). The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and not necessarily those of NDCS.

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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: Partly

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: Topic

The article is developed around a very pertinent topic for different research fields as sociology, youth studies, education and inclusion: political participation of deaf young people. Through a quantitative approach the study aims to compare not deaf and deaf young people levels of political participation. Less attention has been given to policital participation among young people from the deaf culture.

Abstract:

The abstract includes information regarding the research gap, method, results and recommendations, but would benefit from a clear theoretical and conceptual standpoint underlying the research and data analysis.

Introduction: the introductions starts by providing an analytical context for youth participation, in particular recent forms of participation or involvement in social movements and the absence ok knowledge regarding how young deaf are part of those.

Although the concept of interseccionality is mentioned it seems that deafness is the main characteristic (variable) that interfere in being involved in practices of participation and it sounds that the author is pointing to a more homogenous perspective of Deaf community.

Moreover, the concept of political participation needed to be defined and clarified at this point of the article as in the end of the introduction some results and claims are presented but without any clear guidance regarding the main conceptual organisers.

Lit. Review

This section focus on contribution of the literature to understand political participation of people with disabilities and raise relevant questions regarding levels of participation among that population and discusses specifically how participation among deaf people. However, I suggest to further discuss some aspects that sounds incomplete. For example, the sentence in page 3 sound incomplete, our at least needed some additional information: “In contrast, the literature on Deaf people who are sign language users and political 75 participation is distinct”. Could you elaborate a bit more on this idea.

This section needs some review at two levels: level of structure as it is a bit circular and moving back and forward around the issue of disables and Deaf youth, mixing political rights and citizenship discussion with identity deriving sign language. Although it is understandable the reference to all of this subjects the section needs a clear sequence of topics to which are given relevance by the main aim of this article. This leads to the second level: content level. To include literature review regarding political participation of young people in general sounds necessary, not only because implicitly it is against those theoretical perspectives that Deaf youth participation is understood, but also because this study aims to compare Deaf youth with youth in general. The debate on political participation and what it is included in that definition seems necessary in this context.

Suggestion: I suggest to include the last paragraph related to READY either in the introduction or in the Methods section.

Method

Methodological procedures, as well as specifically Ethical procedures are clear and presented in detail. Procedures regarding how hypothesis were approached are detailed and well explained, supported by similar actions taken before. Regarding the third hypothesis, the PCA resulted in three factors with consistency and with alpha values that are good for social sciences. One factor has only one item and this would deserve a clear justification. Moreover, theoretical support of the 3 factors would be beneficial for clarity and pertinence.

Results and discussion

The descriptive statistics could provide information to understand results intra sample (READY respondents) to understand if deafness is the main variable to explain different results. This aspect is more clear in the following sections presenting interesting results, but the gender differences found, for example, are not clearly explained and discussed. This section is mainly presented at the descriptive level. I suggest proposing an explanatory framework to support results and to connect those with theory. There are signs that the Deaf young people are diverse intra sample and this is not completely explored.

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What is the contribution of this study to advance new layers of understanding regarding youth participation?

In the abstract the last sentence points to some contributions to policies development, but the article either in results or in the conclusion does not elaborate on this.

Reviewer #2: An excellent manuscript to be published which compares the levels of political participation among deaf youth with those of their peers in the general population and discusses how sociodemographic factors, self-identification as deaf, and meaningful interactions with other deaf people contribute to their political engagement. However, this manuscript needs more discussion, which can be improved by referring to the highlighted literature review.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Political participation among deaf youth in Great Britain

PONE-D-23-35756R1

Dear Dr. Espinoza,

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,

Nabeel Al-Yateem, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

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

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #3: Yes

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

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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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

Reviewer #3: Yes

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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

Reviewer #3: Yes

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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: The manuscripts underscore the importance of acknowledging the diversity of deaf youth in terms of affiliation with various forms of deaf identity, rendering their experience different from both disabled and hearing youth. All the comments have been addressed and the manuscript is recommended for publication.

Reviewer #3: "Political participation among deaf youth in Great Britain" is a very-well written paper which has an important contribution to make to the literature on political participation by a special focus on deaf youth in Great Britain. As a reviewer who is reading the paper in its second round, I also had the possibility to read the review of Reviewer 1 and the responses of the authors. As far as I can see, all the comments/suggestions of the Reviewer 1 was taken seriously and the paper in its actual form addresses all these points. The paper does not only present novel research and discusses thouroughly the findings of this novel research. These findings challenge the existent literature discussing the reduced political involvements among individuals with disabilities as they demonstrate that deaf youth participate more actively in politics than their hearing peers. The paper also demonstrates that deaf youth is also not homogeneous and underlines the complexity and intersectionality involved with this category. The conclusion successfully summarizes the main findings and also highlight the limitations of the study for further research. In conclusion, I believe that he paper meets all the criteria of the journal and will make an important contribution to the literature on political participation.

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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: No

Reviewer #3: No

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