Child mental health predictors among camp Tamil refugees: Utilizing linear and XGBOOST models

Muna Saleh; Elizabeth Amona; Miriam Kuttikat; Indranil Sahoo; David Chan; Jennifer Murphy; Kyeongmo Kim; Hannah George; Marianne Lund

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0303632

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJuly 20, 2023
6 Dec 2023 Decision Letter - Kamrul Hsan, Editor PONE-D-23-22224Child Mental Health Predictors Among Camp Refugees: Utilizing Linear and XGBOOST ModelsPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Kuttikat, 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 Jan 20 2024 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, Kamrul Hsan, MS Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Note from Emily Chenette, Editor in Chief of PLOS ONE, and Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Director of Open Research Solutions at PLOS: Did you know that depositing data in a repository is associated with up to a 25% citation advantage (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230416)? If you’ve not already done so, consider depositing your raw data in a repository to ensure your work is read, appreciated and cited by the largest possible audience. You’ll also earn an Accessible Data icon on your published paper if you deposit your data in any participating repository (https://plos.org/open-science/open-data/#accessible-data). 3. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: "This work was supported by National institute of Health Fogarty International [grant numberK01 TW 009648]." We note that you have provided additional information within the Acknowledgements Section that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. Please note that funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: "No" Additionally, because some of your funding information pertains to [commercial funding//patents], we ask you to provide an updated Competing Interests statement, declaring all sources of commercial funding. In your Competing Interests statement, please confirm that your commercial funding does not alter your adherence to PLOS ONE Editorial policies and criteria by including the following statement: "This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests. If this statement is not true and your adherence to PLOS policies on sharing data and materials is altered, please explain how. Please include the updated Competing Interests Statement and Funding Statement in your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf. 4. 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. [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: Partly 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: No 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: Child mental Health Predictors among the Camp Refugees My general comment: The manuscript has great potential to generate good scientific results in the area of traumatic stress and refugee mental health studies. However, the study’s objectives are not clear, a little confusing and hard to follow. Can the authors come up with hypotheses too. Please see my brief specific comments below. Abstract: Objectives I fail to understand the distinction between the following objectives 1.Describe the best predictors of Children’s depressive symptoms 2. Determine the variable importance of predictors of depressive …… 3. To provide “initial” what do the authors mean by “Initial” -Please provide the statistical software used in the analysis Generally, the abstract is confusing: The authors should bear in mind the structure of the abstract as follows. a) Background/ introduction b) Objective c) Methods d) Results e) Conclusions and Recommendations The Background to the study is well written but brief. The authors could benefit from the following previous studies 1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24478246/Journal of traumatic stress, 27(1), 35–41. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.2189 (2) https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2017.1283086https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5328389/ It is not clear whether the authors are assessing the children on their personal experiences or the parent’s potentially traumatic experiences. Methods are described and written well. Results: Have significant potential. However, since the objectives weren’t clear from the inception, the flow of the results poses difficulty to readability. Reviewer #2: The manuscript was technically good and sound. But there were some issues to be addressed and amendments. Please se the details at the PDF. Issues were given as comments on the PDF. Why only 120 samples were measured? Is there any limitation? Does it exceeds minimal sample size? What is the number of adolescents of that camp? (See all comments at the manuscript PDF file) You can upload the data to any public repository or give with the manuscript as supplementary file. ****** 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: No Reviewer #2: Yes: Abu Bakkar Siddique ******** [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: PONE-D-23-22224 with reviewer comments.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303632.r001
Revision 1
26 Feb 2024 Author Response Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. Response: We have followed the format suggested. One reviewer asked us to deviate from the abstract format which we have ignored to stay with the suggested format requested by the editor. 2. Note from Emily Chenette, Editor in Chief of PLOS ONE, and Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Director of Open Research Solutions at PLOS: Did you know that depositing data in a repository is associated with up to a 25% citation advantage (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230416)? If you’ve not already done so, consider depositing your raw data in a repository to ensure your work is read, appreciated and cited by the largest possible audience. You’ll also earn an Accessible Data icon on your published paper if you deposit your data in any participating repository (https://plos.org/open-science/open-data/#accessible-data). Response: Thank you for this suggestion. We do plan on putting the data in a repository once we have completed the analysis of the data for future papers. We have multiple papers analyzing this data currently, and will make the data available once we have completed these manuscripts. 3. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: "This work was supported by National institute of Health Fogarty International [grant numberK01 TW 009648]." We note that you have provided additional information within the Acknowledgements Section that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. Please note that funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: "No" Additionally, because some of your funding information pertains to [commercial funding//patents], we ask you to provide an updated Competing Interests statement, declaring all sources of commercial funding. In your Competing Interests statement, please confirm that your commercial funding does not alter your adherence to PLOS ONE Editorial policies and criteria by including the following statement: "This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests. If this statement is not true and your adherence to PLOS policies on sharing data and materials is altered, please explain how. Response: The authors declare this statement is true Please include the updated Competing Interests Statement and Funding Statement in your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf. Response: This has been completed. 4. 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. Response: We have added the IRB number to the manuscript (bottom of page 9). We provide a discussion on our ethical considerations on page 10 to 11. Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author Reviewer #1: Child mental Health Predictors among the Camp Refugees My general comment: The manuscript has great potential to generate good scientific results in the area of traumatic stress and refugee mental health studies. However, the study’s objectives are not clear, a little confusing and hard to follow. Can the authors come up with hypotheses too. Response: All changes to the manuscript are highlighted in yellow. We have added a “Present Study” section in the manuscript to better illustrate the goals and objectives of the study. We have added three central research questions to this section and have chosen not to include a hypothesis. We hope these modifications are sufficient. Please see my brief specific comments below. Abstract: Objectives I fail to understand the distinction between the following objectives 1.Describe the best predictors of Children’s depressive symptoms 2. Determine the variable importance of predictors of depressive …… 3. To provide “initial” what do the authors mean by “Initial” -Please provide the statistical software used in the analysis Response: This has been addressed. Note that the statistical software was already mentioned in the manuscript. Generally, the abstract is confusing: The authors should bear in mind the structure of the abstract as follows. a) Background/ introduction b) Objective c) Methods d) Results e) Conclusions and Recommendations Response: Thank you for the feedback. We have revised our abstract for clarity, however, we have chosen to remain with an unstructured/narrative abstract. We note that The journal allows for both abstract formats. The Background to the study is well written but brief. The authors could benefit from the following previous studies 1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24478246/Journal of traumatic stress, 27(1), 35–41. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.2189 (2) https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2017.1283086https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5328389/ Response: We have significantly expanded on our background and have provided much needed contextual information for the study. We hope these changes will be welcomed by the reviewers. It is not clear whether the authors are assessing the children on their personal experiences or the parent’s potentially traumatic experiences. Response: Thank you for this feedback! It is difficult to completely separate these two factors. In general, both of these factors play an important role in a child's mental health and we consider both. We have added on to the background section to better illustrate our central rationale undergirding the study, including the addition of a Present Study section. We hope these additions make our objectives more clear. Methods are described and written well. Results: Have significant potential. However, since the objectives weren’t clear from the inception, the flow of the results poses difficulty to readability. Response: We have rewritten the objectives/hypotheses. Reviewer #2: The manuscript was technically good and sound. But there were some issues to be addressed and amendments. Please see the details at the PDF. Issues were given as comments on the PDF. Response: We have modified as the reviewer asked with a few exceptions. The style of abstract is different from the format given by the format suggested by the style template so no change was made. This is also the case with the limitations and recommendations. The comment in the introduction asking about the importance of the study is clearly stated by the lines highlighted in this section. Another comment asked about OfERR which the reviewer perhaps missed, as it was already included in the manuscript. The question at the beginning of the Data Collection section asked whether the seven year old data is represented for today, which we feel is not an appropriate question since this manuscript is focused on the analysis of the collected data, and not on the predictive validity of the data. There is another comment in this section that asks about the fraction which gave oral or written consent; the authors feel that this is irrelevant when it comes to the analysis, as both forms of consent are valid. There is a question on the reasons for only taking 4 male participants, but there is no reason for this aside from convenience sampling. This includes all the data collected. Why only 120 samples were measured? Is there any limitation? Does it exceeds minimal sample size? What is the number of adolescents of that camp? (See all comments at the manuscript PDF file) Response: Thank you for the feedback. We have included a power analysis (page 16) that indicates the sample size is acceptable. We hope this addition addresses questions related to sample size. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers-XGBoost models (2).docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303632.r002
30 Apr 2024 Decision Letter - Kamrul Hsan, Editor Child Mental Health Predictors Among Camp Refugees: Utilizing Linear and XGBOOST Models PONE-D-23-22224R1 Dear Dr. Kuttikat, 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 will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, 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, Kamrul Hsan, MS Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303632.r003
Formally Accepted
2 Jul 2024 Acceptance Letter - Kamrul Hsan, Editor PONE-D-23-22224R1 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Kuttikat, 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. Kamrul Hsan Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303632.r004

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .