Development, validation, and reliability testing of the College Perspectives around Food Insecurity survey

Jennette Kilgrow; Elyce Gamble; Amanda Meier; Kyle Lyman; Andrea Barney; Cade Kartchner; Paola Martinez; Kanae Lee; Carol Mathusek; Kelly Ang; Brooke M. Green; Jinan Banna; Dennis L. Eggett; Stephanie Grutzmacher; Jennifer A. Jackson; Kendra OoNorasak; Nathan Stokes; Rickelle Richards

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0317444

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJune 7, 2024
21 Oct 2024 Decision Letter - Amin Nakhostin-Ansari, Editor PONE-D-24-06404Development, validation, and reliability testing of the College Perspectives Around Food Insecurity surveyPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Richards, 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 Dec 05 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 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. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: Internal funding from Brigham Young University. Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript." If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 3. In the online submission form, you indicated that your data is available only on request from a third party. Please note that your Data Availability Statement is currently missing the name of the third party contact or institution / contact details for the third party, such as an email address or a link to where data requests can be made. Please update your statement with the missing information. [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: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: N/A ****** 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: No ****** 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: No ****** 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: The study aims to understand the impact of food insecruity in college student population. The authors tested the survey reliability. I think the authors should include a discussion about survey participant recruitment as well as how they will reduce biases during recruitment of certain individuals wanting to participate in surveys. They short of touch the subject. I think that is an important component of the survey study. Reviewer #2: The manuscript by Jennette Kilgrow et al discusses the development, validation, and reliability testing of a survey on college perspectives around food insecurity. The main goal of this study was to develop and test the validity and reliability of a survey aimed at evaluating internal and external factors related to college food insecurity. The authors have used a mixed methods approach to evaluate the College Perspectives on Food Insecurity survey. However, the manuscript could proceed further after the modification following the comments below. 1) The introduction of this manuscript is poorly written. It should be modified with more relevant references. 2) The results of this survey are necessary to show a graph including the participants' details. 3) The references are not updated. 4) There is no statistical analysis. In my point of view, a statistical analysis could help to understand the results of the survey. ****** 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: Dr. Azizur Rahman ******** [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
5 Dec 2024 Author Response Editor Comments Journal 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 Response: We revised our manuscript based on PLOS ONE’s style requirements. We also ensured that our file names matched the style requirements. 2. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: Internal funding from Brigham Young University. Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript." If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. Response: The funders had no role in the study, so we included that statement in our cover letter. Thank you for making this correction on our behalf. 3. In the online submission form, you indicated that your data is available only on request from a third party. Please note that your Data Availability Statement is currently missing the name of the third party contact or institution / contact details for the third party, such as an email address or a link to where data requests can be made. Please update your statement with the missing information. Response: We modified this statement to include the contact information of the third party. In this case, the data sharing agreement form gets first approved through Brigham Young University’s IRB administrator. We added the office’s email address as a contact point for establishing the data sharing agreement. In the online submission form, it now states: Data cannot be shared publicly because a data sharing agreement would need to be put in place first to stipulate how the data can be used. Data are available for institutions willing to complete a data sharing agreement with Brigham Young University (irb@byu.edu) that gets approved through the researcher's institutions. Reviewer #1 1. The study aims to understand the impact of food insecruity in college student population. The authors tested the survey reliability. I think the authors should include a discussion about survey participant recruitment as well as how they will reduce biases during recruitment of certain individuals wanting to participate in surveys. They short of touch the subject. I think that is an important component of the survey study. Response: Thanks for this feedback. We added content to the participant recruitment section to clarify our recruitment approach. See lines 104-121. We added additional text in the limitations section to acknowledge the possibility of bias being introduced into our study based on using non-probability sampling strategies. See lines 403-405. Reviewer #2 1. The manuscript by Jennette Kilgrow et al discusses the development, validation, and reliability testing of a survey on college perspectives around food insecurity. The main goal of this study was to develop and test the validity and reliability of a survey aimed at evaluating internal and external factors related to college food insecurity. The authors have used a mixed methods approach to evaluate the College Perspectives on Food Insecurity survey. However, the manuscript could proceed further after the modification following the comments below. Response: We appreciate the reviewer’s time in evaluating our manuscript and for the feedback provided to us. 2. The introduction of this manuscript is poorly written. It should be modified with more relevant references. Response: We revised the Introduction for clarity. We also added updated citations to more recent publications on food insecurity and college students. Please see lines 53-82. 3. The results of this survey are necessary to show a graph including the participants' details. Response: Researchers provide demographic information about students who participated in cognitive interviews (phase 3) and the pilot study (phase 4). Please see Tables 1 and 2. Because the intent of this study was to evaluate validity and reliability of survey questions, researchers only presented data relevant to these aims. Thus, the present study provides details about how researchers developed the survey based on feedback from expert reviewers and students. Students’ responses to the various survey questions will be presented in future manuscripts with a larger (and different) sample from the present study. 4. The references are not updated. Response: We appreciate this feedback. We updated the references in the Introduction to those published within the past 5 years. We also updated the references in the Discussion to those published in the past 5 years when more recent, relevant works were available. We did not update the references cited in the Methods section because those were the works that we used throughout the research study period. 5. There is no statistical analysis. In my point of view, a statistical analysis could help to understand the results of the survey. Response: Researchers added chi-square statistics and Fisher’s exact test (when > 20% of expected cell counts were <5) to compare differences between students with food security vs. food insecurity for the reliability testing phase 4. A p-value <0.05 was considered significant. Please see lines 245-248 and Table 2. Given the small sample sizes in the cognitive interviews phase 3, no statistical comparisons were calculated. We used descriptive statistics to display the demographics data in Table 1. However, we noted that this was not described in the Analysis section. We have added this text in lines 232-234. Researchers also used descriptive statistics (means) to evaluate expert reviewers’ feedback on each survey question related to clear phrasing, importance, and content appropriateness. A threshold of 8.0 (on average) was considered for evaluating content validity. This is described in lines 221-224. Researchers evaluated survey reliability through test-retest statistics and Cronbach-alpha statistics. This is described in lines 236-241 (note that some modifications in text were made for clarity). As mentioned previously, the intent of this study was to present the survey development process used to evaluate survey validity and reliability. Students’ responses to the various survey questions will be presented in future manuscripts with a larger (and different) sample from the present study. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317444.r002
30 Dec 2024 Decision Letter - Mehdi Rezaei, Editor Development, validation, and reliability testing of the College Perspectives Around Food Insecurity survey PONE-D-24-06404R1 Dear Dr. Richards, 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. 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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 #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 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 #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: N/A Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 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 #1: Yes 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 #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 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 #1: I think that the authors have addressed my comments. I wish them all the best for this proposed work. Reviewer #2: Thanks to the authors for addressing my comments and revising the manuscript. I believe this manuscript is now ready to publish. ****** 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 Reviewer #2: Yes: Azizur Rahman ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317444.r003
Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Mehdi Rezaei, Editor PONE-D-24-06404R1 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Richards, 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. Mehdi Rezaei Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317444.r004

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