Psychometric properties of the Functional Literacy Questionnaire among Portuguese adolescents

Raquel Martins; Carolina Capitão; Rodrigo Feteira-Santos; Ana Virgolino; Osvaldo Santos

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0306802

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionFebruary 29, 2024
7 May 2024 Decision Letter - Maria José Nogueira, Editor PONE-D-24-07888Psychometric properties of the Functional Literacy Questionnaire among Portuguese adolescentsPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Martins, 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 Jun 21 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. 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The references need to be revised in an effort to use more recent authors, as they have a large percentage of articles that are more than 10 years old. [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 ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? 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Reviewer #1: 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: GENERAL COMMENTS: The study aimed to assess the validity and reliability of the Functional Literacy Questionnaire for Portuguese adolescents using CFA. While the topic is intriguing, several issues need addressing before publication. SPECIFIC COMMENTS: The review appears limited with only two identified manuscripts. Expanding the search period beyond 2020-2023 and adding keywords could potentially yield more relevant literature and broaden the review's scope. INTRODUCTION: Minor revisions are required for clarification in the introduction. Specify the study's aim and establish a clear research question. Restructure the introduction to emphasize the study's significance and rationale behind the CFA investigation. Streamline the introduction for conciseness. METHODS: Provide more information on participant recruitment methods for clarity. Include a psychologist in the panels for Phase 1. RESULTS: In Table 2, emphasize the significance of the results by explaining the findings more explicitly. DISCUSSION: Expand on the implications of the study findings in the discussion, focusing on result-related discussions. Avoid delving into irrelevant topics and trim unnecessary details of previous studies. Enhance the discussion by considering limitations more comprehensively. Update the reference list with newer sources. Overall, well done on the study. Thank you. ****** 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. 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Revision 1
21 Jun 2024 Author Response Manuscript number: PONE-D-24-07888 Lisbon, 21 June 2024 Dear Editor-in-Chief Dr. Emily Chenette, Thank you for the opportunity to submit a revised version of our manuscript, “Psychometric properties of the Functional Literacy Questionnaire among Portuguese adolescents”, for publication in PLOS ONE. We appreciate the interest shown in our study and the insightful comments that were made. We have carefully revised the manuscript according to the suggestions of the academic editor and the reviewer, which greatly improved the quality of the manuscript. Please consider the following answers to the comments/suggestions, one by one. We have also submitted a revised manuscript with changes highlighted, as required. We look forward to hearing from you soon and we are available to respond to any further questions or comments you may have. Yours, sincerely, Raquel Martins Environmental Health Behavior Lab, Institute of Environmental Health, Lisbon School of Medicine Avenida Professor Egas Moniz 1649-028 Lisboa, PORTUGAL Phone: +351 21 799 94 89 E-mail: rfmartins@medicina.ulisboa.pt Note: Lines and page numbers are referred to the version of the manuscript without track changes. Reviewers' Comments to the Authors: Academic Editor: Comment: Ethical considerations - Authors must mention the authorization number of the Ethics Committee that approved the study. It is a relevant study with a robust methodology and statistical treatment, which adds pertinent knowledge in this area. Reply: We appreciate the editor’s acknowledgment of the relevance and robustness of our study. As suggested, we have included the authorization number of the Ethics Committee in the ethical considerations section (lines 273-4, page 12). Comment: The references need to be revised in an effort to use more recent authors, as they have a large percentage of articles that are more than 10 years old. Reply: Thank you for your valuable feedback. We have thoroughly revised the reference list to include more recent sources whenever possible to ensure that our manuscript reflects the most current research. We have retained some references that are over 10 years old due to their importance in this field. Those references concern statistical methods, cutoff points, and conceptual definitions that remain widely accepted and have not been superseded by more recent research. Reviewer #1: Comment: The review appears limited with only two identified manuscripts. Expanding the search period beyond 2020-2023 and adding keywords could potentially yield more relevant literature and broaden the review's scope. Reply: We have now conducted a more comprehensive search focusing on the health literacy concept, dimensions and components, its relationship with health outcomes, and the prior application of tools that assess functional health literacy levels. We explored the literature again without time restrictions, including keywords that returned a wide range of results. We have reformulated the introduction to make it clearer and more concise. Comment: Minor revisions are required for clarification in the introduction. Specify the study's aim and establish a clear research question. Restructure the introduction to emphasize the study's significance and rationale behind the CFA investigation. Streamline the introduction for conciseness. Reply: Thank you for your comment. We have revised the introduction and streamlined the text for conciseness, as suggested. We also reformulated the aim of the study and explored the rationale for the use of classical test theory (including exploratory factor analysis) and item response theory in this investigation (lines 104-21, pages 5-6). Changes have been made throughout the entire Introduction section (pages 3-6). Comment: Provide more information on participant recruitment methods for clarity. Include a psychologist in the panels for Phase 1. Reply: We reviewed the methods section and detailed the recruitment process for experts (lines 135-42; pages 6-7) and adolescents (lines 164-70; page 8). Regarding the composition of the Delphi Panel, we had included a psychologist in the group, however, this was not clearly stated in the manuscript. To address your comment, which we greatly appreciate, we have now specified the professional backgrounds of all participating experts in the results section (lines 289-92; page 13). Comment: In Table 2, emphasize the significance of the results by explaining the findings more explicitly. Reply: We have added a sentence highlighting the overall academic achievement of the studied sample and the difference between sexes regarding Portuguese classifications (lines 320-1; page 14). Comment: Expand on the implications of the study findings in the discussion, focusing on result-related discussions. Avoid delving into irrelevant topics and trim unnecessary details of previous studies. Enhance the discussion by considering limitations more comprehensively. Update the reference list with newer sources. Reply: Thank you for your insightful comment. We explored more comprehensively the implications of our findings and the limitations of our study (pages 24-30). We have revised the discussion and trimmed unnecessary details of previous studies. We also have updated the reference list, as indicated previously. We believe these revisions enhance the clarity and relevance of the discussion section. Journal Requirements: 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. Reply: We have reviewed PLOS ONE's style requirements and made changes accordingly, namely on the headings (capitalizing only the first word), and the format of the figures/table’s captions (title in bold, legend without bold). We have also changed the name of the figure files and reuploaded them to the platform. 2. 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. Reply: Thank you for this relevant comment. We have revised the manuscript and deleted the phrase “data not shown”, which was used twice (pages 15 and 19). We confirmed that, in these two situations, all information is available in the text and there is no need for supplementary data (otherwise we would just be replicating information). 3. Please upload a copy of Supporting Information Figure/Table/etc. "Supporting information" which you refer to in your text on page 35. Reply: Thank you for pointing this out. In our first submission, we mistakenly listed all tables and figures mentioned in the text in the “Supporting information” section. However, we do not have supplementary content to add to the paper. The health literacy questionnaire under study, correction criteria, and dataset are available on Zenodo (as indicated in the manuscript). In total, we have seven tables (all present in the manuscript file) and three figures (uploaded separately to the submission platform). We have reuploaded all figures because changes were made in the title and legend, following PLOS ONE guidelines. 4. 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. Reply: Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We have reviewed the reference list and replaced some of them with relevant and more recent references. After this review, we confirmed that there are no retracted papers cited in the manuscript. The changes in the reference list were as follows: • We have replaced the reference “World Health Organization. Health Promotion Glossary. Geneva; 1998” with “Sørensen K, Van den Broucke S, Fullam J, Doyle G, Pelikan J, Slonska Z, et al. Health literacy and public health: A systematic review and integration of definitions and models. BMC Public Health. 2012;12: 80. doi:10.1186/1471-2458-12-80” • We added a reference in the contextualization of health literacy “Nutbeam D, McGill B, Premkumar P. Improving health literacy in community populations: a review of progress. Health Promot Int. 2018;33: 901–911. doi:10.1093/heapro/dax015” • We have replaced the references “White S. Relationship of Preventive Health Practices and Health Literacy: A National Study. Am J Health Behav. 2008;32. doi:10.5993/AJHB.32.3.1” and “Berkman ND, Sheridan SL, Donahue KE, Halpern DJ, Crotty K. Low Health Literacy and Health Outcomes: An Updated Systematic Review. Ann Intern Med. 2011;155: 97. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-155-2-201107190-00005” with “Shahid R, Shoker M, Chu LM, Frehlick R, Ward H, Pahwa P. Impact of low health literacy on patients’ health outcomes: a multicenter cohort study. BMC Health Serv Res. 2022;22. doi:10.1186/s12913-022-08527-9” • We replaced the reference “Baker DW, Wolf MS, Feinglass J, Thompson JA. Health Literacy, Cognitive Abilities, and Mortality Among Elderly Persons. J Gen Intern Med. 2008;23: 723–726. doi:10.1007/s11606-008-0566-4” with “Fan Z ya, Yang Y, Zhang F. Association between health literacy and mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Archives of Public Health. 2021. doi:10.1186/s13690-021-00648-7” • We removed the reference “Yan T, Tourangeau R. Fast times and easy questions: the effects of age, experience and question complexity on web survey response times. Appl Cogn Psychol. 2008;22: 51–68. doi:10.1002/acp.1331”, in response to the reviewer's suggestion to streamline the text and eliminate irrelevant information. During our review, the sentence citing this reference was deemed unnecessary and has been deleted. • We removed the reference “Martins A, Andrade I. Adaptação cultural e validação da versão portuguesa de Newest Vital Sign. Revista de Enfermagem Referência. 2014;IV Série: 75–83. doi:10.12707/RIII1399” because it was the same as the reference as “Martins A, Andrade I. Cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the portuguese version of the Newest Vital Sign. Revista de Enfermagem Referência. 2014;IV: 75–83. doi:10.12707/RIII1399”. • When exploring the rationale for using exploratory factor analysis a reference was added: “Watkins MW. Exploratory Factor Analysis: A Guide to Best Practice. Journal of Black Psychology. 2018;44: 219–246. doi:10.1177/0095798418771807”. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0306802.r002
24 Jun 2024 Decision Letter - Maria José Nogueira, Editor Psychometric properties of the Functional Literacy Questionnaire among Portuguese adolescents PONE-D-24-07888R1 Dear Dr. Raquel Martins 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, Maria José Nogueira, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): The authors reformulated the manuscript according to the reviewers' recommendations, which greatly added clarity and robustness, The manuscript is now ready to be accepted for publication. Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0306802.r003
Formally Accepted
14 Aug 2024 Acceptance Letter - Maria José Nogueira, Editor PONE-D-24-07888R1 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Martins, 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 Professor Maria José Nogueira Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0306802.r004

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