The effectiveness of group interpersonal synchrony in young autistic adults’ work environment: A mixed methods RCT study protocol

Tamar Dvir; Tal-Chen Rabinowitch; Cochavit Elefant

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0307956

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMay 9, 2023
7 Feb 2024 Decision Letter - Stergios Makris, Editor PONE-D-23-06520The effectiveness of group interpersonal synchrony in young autistic adults’ work environment: A mixed methods RCT study protocolPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Dvir, 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 Mar 23 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. 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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. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal, and if verbal, how it was documented and witnessed). If your study included minors, state whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians. If the need for consent was waived by the ethics committee, please include this information. 3. When completing the data availability statement of the submission form, you indicated that you will make your data available on acceptance. We strongly recommend all authors decide on a data sharing plan before acceptance, as the process can be lengthy and hold up publication timelines. Please note that, though access restrictions are acceptable now, your entire data will need to be made freely accessible if your manuscript is accepted for publication. This policy applies to all data except where public deposition would breach compliance with the protocol approved by your research ethics board. If you are unable to adhere to our open data policy, please kindly revise your statement to explain your reasoning and we will seek the editor's input on an exemption. Please be assured that, once you have provided your new statement, the assessment of your exemption will not hold up the peer review process. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Does the manuscript provide a valid rationale for the proposed study, with clearly identified and justified research questions? The research question outlined is expected to address a valid academic problem or topic and contribute to the base of knowledge in the field. Reviewer #1: Yes ******** 2. Is the protocol technically sound and planned in a manner that will lead to a meaningful outcome and allow testing the stated hypotheses? The manuscript should describe the methods in sufficient detail to prevent undisclosed flexibility in the experimental procedure or analysis pipeline, including sufficient outcome-neutral conditions (e.g. necessary controls, absence of floor or ceiling effects) to test the proposed hypotheses and a statistical power analysis where applicable. As there may be aspects of the methodology and analysis which can only be refined once the work is undertaken, authors should outline potential assumptions and explicitly describe what aspects of the proposed analyses, if any, are exploratory. Reviewer #1: Partly ****** 3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable? Descriptions of methods and materials in the protocol should be reported in sufficient detail for another researcher to reproduce all experiments and analyses. The protocol should describe the appropriate controls, sample size calculations, and replication needed to ensure that the data are robust and reproducible. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception, at the time of publication. 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 ****** 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 #1: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above and, if applicable, provide comments about issues authors must address before this protocol can be accepted for publication. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about research or publication ethics. You may also provide optional suggestions and comments to authors that they might find helpful in planning their study. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The abstract reads as if it is a final paper, when it only becomes obvious that it is not by the absence of a results section. This should have been made clearer at the outset. Also, it would have been good to read about some preliminary results from the pilot study. The work plan looks reasonable, with a decent procedure and interesting question., There is a good number of participants (N=60). I have a number of minor questions, however: Why aren't all participants interviewed? The five studies that are referred to on p25 -31 need to be more clearly stated to remind the readers that they refer to the original objectives of p15. i.e. a clearer link. The use of Fitbits to monitor step counting is an interesting approach. It would be helpful to elaborate on exactly how step counting is related to cooperation. In that same study, I am also curious as to whether it is cooperation vs competition that might be the driving force. (There is related work using similar wearables to measure social behaviour in autism, that it might be helpful to look into.) Early in the manuscript the phrase, "who developed ASD during her second year of life", might be problematic for some – it makes various assumptions about the causes of autism. Perhaps, “who were diagnosed as ASD” might be more appropriate. ****** 7. 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 ******** [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/. 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Revision 1
6 Mar 2024 Author Response Comment: The abstract reads as if it is a final paper, when it only becomes obvious that it is not by the absence of a results section. This should have been made clearer at the outset. Answer: Thank you for this important comment. We revised the abstract to clearly state that this is a study protocol (on page 2 lines 19-20). Comment: Also, it would have been good to read about some preliminary results from the pilot study. Answer: Thank you for suggesting to include preliminary results from the pilot. We revised the Study status section to clearly state that no data was collected during the assessment of the intervention protocol (on page 26 lines 514-518), therefore there are no preliminary results. Comment: Why aren't all participants interviewed? Answer: Thank you for this question. We revised the Qualitative data collection section to state that interviews will be conducted till no new themes or insights emerge from additional interviews (on page 23 line 461-462). Comment: The five studies that are referred to on p25 -31 need to be more clearly stated to remind the readers that they refer to the original objectives of p15. i.e. a clearer link. Answer: Thank you for this important comment. We revised the Data analysis section to refer to the original objectives (on page 25 line 489-490). Comment: The use of Fitbits to monitor step counting is an interesting approach. It would be helpful to elaborate on exactly how step counting is related to cooperation. In that same study, I am also curious as to whether it is cooperation vs competition that might be the driving force. (There is related work using similar wearables to measure social behaviour in autism, that it might be helpful to look into.) Answer: Thank you for these important comments. We revised the Methods section to elaborate on the driving force in this specific cooperation task and to link step counting to cooperation via calculating step rate, representing the participant’s effort (on page 22-23 line 433-446). Comment: Early in the manuscript the phrase, "who developed ASD during her second year of life", might be problematic for some – it makes various assumptions about the causes of autism. Perhaps, “who were diagnosed as ASD” might be more appropriate. Answer: Thank you for this important comment. We revised the Introduction section as follows (on page 4 line 61). Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307956.r002
17 Apr 2024 Decision Letter - Stergios Makris, Editor PONE-D-23-06520R1The effectiveness of group interpersonal synchrony in young autistic adults’ work environment: A mixed methods RCT study protocolPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Dvir, 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 May 31 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, Stergios Makris Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: 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. Does the manuscript provide a valid rationale for the proposed study, with clearly identified and justified research questions? The research question outlined is expected to address a valid academic problem or topic and contribute to the base of knowledge in the field. Reviewer #2: Partly ******** 2. Is the protocol technically sound and planned in a manner that will lead to a meaningful outcome and allow testing the stated hypotheses? The manuscript should describe the methods in sufficient detail to prevent undisclosed flexibility in the experimental procedure or analysis pipeline, including sufficient outcome-neutral conditions (e.g. necessary controls, absence of floor or ceiling effects) to test the proposed hypotheses and a statistical power analysis where applicable. As there may be aspects of the methodology and analysis which can only be refined once the work is undertaken, authors should outline potential assumptions and explicitly describe what aspects of the proposed analyses, if any, are exploratory. Reviewer #2: Partly ****** 3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable? Descriptions of methods and materials in the protocol should be reported in sufficient detail for another researcher to reproduce all experiments and analyses. The protocol should describe the appropriate controls, sample size calculations, and replication needed to ensure that the data are robust and reproducible. Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception, at the time of publication. 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 ****** 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 ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above and, if applicable, provide comments about issues authors must address before this protocol can be accepted for publication. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about research or publication ethics. You may also provide optional suggestions and comments to authors that they might find helpful in planning their study. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #2: What is the “mixed methods approach”? Need to specify primary aims (confirmatory?) and secondary aims (exploratory?). The small sample size will not have sufficient power for so many hypothesis testings. The authors mentioned that the sample size will not support mediating or moderating analysis, then these analyses may not be performed. Sample size calculation: F=0.2 needs to be justified. Specify primary endpoint and secondary endpoints. Line 261: “between-subject” can be omitted. P values needs to adjusted for multiple tests. ****** 7. 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 #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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307956.r003
Revision 2
6 Jun 2024 Author Response What is the “mixed methods approach”? We revised the abstract to clearly state that a convergent mixed methods design will be applied (on page 9 line 189-190): A convergent mixed methods design will be applied, where quantitative and qualitative data are collected and analyzed in parallel. Need to specify primary aims (confirmatory?) and secondary aims (exploratory?). Thank you for this important suggestion. We revised the abstract to specify one primary objective and four secondary objectives (on page 9 lines 178-186): The primary objective is to determine whether a synchronized group intervention will have an immediate and/or long-term positive effect on participants’ prosociality and work-related stress. The secondary objectives are to determine: (1) Whether a synchronized group intervention will have an immediate and/or long-term positive effect on participants’ social closeness and sense of belonging, (2) Whether this effect will be influenced by participants’ need to belong as reported before the intervention, (3) How participants perceive the intervention as affecting their prosociality and work-related stress, and (4) In what ways the participants’ perception will contribute to a better understanding of the intervention effect. The small sample size will not have sufficient power for so many hypothesis testings. The authors mentioned that the sample size will not support mediating or moderating analysis, then these analyses may not be performed. Thank you for this important comment. Since we mentioned that the sample size might not support mediating analysis, we simplified the theoretical model and data analysis (on the Introduction section pages 7-8 lines 145-171, Figure 2 page 9 line 173, and the Quantitative data analysis section pages 25-26 lines 503-515). Sample size calculation: F=0.2 needs to be justified. We revised the abstract to justify the selection of the effect size defined as f=0.25 for sample size calculation that supports the moderating model (on pages 11-12 lines 237-244): A meta-analysis on prosocial consequences of interpersonal synchrony among neurotypical adults found a medium-sized effect of interpersonal synchrony on prosociality with regard to both attitudes and behavior towards individuals or groups involved in the same intervention [28]. Therefore, an effect defined as d = 0.25 may be expected [50]. An a-priori power analysis using the GPower computer program [49] indicated that a total sample size of 40 participants would be needed to detect medium-sized effects defined as f=0.25, with 80% power and alpha at .05, using a repeated measure, within-between interaction ANOVA with four groups and three measurements. Specify primary endpoint and secondary endpoints. We revised the abstract to specify primary and secondary outcomes (Table 2 on page 20 line 383): Table 2. Study outcomes Outcomes Primary Outcomes Work-related stress Non-confidential behavioral cooperation Confidential behavioral cooperation Secondary Outcomes Social closeness Friendship closeness Sense of belonging Line 261: “between-subject” can be omitted. We omitted the “between-subject” (on Page 12 line 262). P values needs to adjusted for multiple tests. Thank you for this important comment. We revised the abstract to state that we will use a statistical procedure to adjust P values for multiple tests (on page 25 lines 498-499): To control the family-wise error rate when performing multiple hypothesis tests, Bonferroni Step-Down (Holm) will be applied. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx* https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307956.r004
16 Jul 2024 Decision Letter - Stergios Makris, Editor The effectiveness of group interpersonal synchrony in young autistic adults’ work environment: A mixed methods RCT study protocol PONE-D-23-06520R2 Dear Dr. Dvir, 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, Stergios Makris Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307956.r005
Formally Accepted
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