Using photovoice to facilitate the report of emotions in an interview setting: An experimental study

Selina Studer; Maria Kleinstäuber; Cornelia Weise

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0322055

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionDecember 6, 2023
6 Dec 2023 Author Response https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0322055.r001
2 Sep 2024 Decision Letter - Cho Lee Wong, Editor PONE-D-23-40707Using Photovoice to facilitate the report of emotions in an interview setting. An experimental study.PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Studer, 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 Oct 17 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. We note that you have indicated that there are restrictions to data sharing for this study. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For more information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. 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You also have the option of uploading the data as Supporting Information files, but we would recommend depositing data directly to a data repository if possible. We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide. 3. In the online submission form, you indicated that [Data cannot be shared publicly because of sensitive content (e.g. worries reported in the interview contain personal and potentially identifying information).Numeric answers to the questionnaire are available on request from the author.]. All PLOS journals now require all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript to be freely available to other researchers, either 1. In a public repository, 2. Within the manuscript itself, or 3. Uploaded as supplementary information.This policy applies to all data except where public deposition would breach compliance with the protocol approved by your research ethics board. If your data cannot be made publicly available for ethical or legal reasons (e.g., public availability would compromise patient privacy), please explain your reasons on resubmission and your exemption request will be escalated for approval. 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. Additional Editor Comments: This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of PV to aid in emotional processing in comparison to other methods. The topic is interesting and innovative. Below are a few comments for consideration. Methods 1. Please elaborate on the sample size calculation. Results 1. Given the different age ranges and employment status, but small sample sizes, would this have an impact on the results? [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: 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: No 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: Yes 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: Thank you for having me review this manuscript. The work is in the important field of psychology and the manuscript is well written. This complements the growing knowledge about the photovoice approach. A few comments to improve the manuscript here below: Abstract. 1. Please add information about gender and mean age. For mean age, provide its standard deviation. Discussion. 1. Please add further clarification to the limitations section. Your sample included highly educated participants, most of whom were students. Moreover, you had fewer male participants, which could imply an insufficient heterogeneity of the sample. Conclusion. 1. From line 503, page 23 to line 515, page 23 you are talking about implications. Please add the implications section. 2. In the conclusion section, please describe your findings more specifically. Reviewer #2: Its a good topic of research. Following are some observations: Don't use full stop in the title. Were universally same emotions were checked? Validity of BFI was already established? Which software has been used to analyze data? ****** 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? 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Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0322055.r002
Revision 1
10 Nov 2024 Author Response PEER REVIEW REPLY ACADEMIC EDITOR 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. Authors’ reply: Thank you for your feedback on PLOS ONE's style requirements. We have formatted our manuscript according to the PLOS ONE’s style requirements. 2. We note that you have indicated that there are restrictions to data sharing for this study. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially identifying or sensitive patient information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., a Research Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board, etc.). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. 3. In the online submission form, you indicated that [Data cannot be shared publicly because of sensitive content (e.g. worries reported in the interview contain personal and potentially identifying information). Numeric answers to the questionnaire are available on request from the author.]. All PLOS journals now require all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript to be freely available to other researchers, either 1. In a public repository, 2. Within the manuscript itself, or 3. Uploaded as supplementary information. This policy applies to all data except where public deposition would breach compliance with the protocol approved by your research ethics board. If your data cannot be made publicly available for ethical or legal reasons (e.g., public availability would compromise patient privacy), please explain your reasons on resubmission and your exemption request will be escalated for approval. Authors’ reply: Thank you for your important feedback on data sharing. The interview transcripts include sensitive and identifiable personal information (e.g., individuals’ worries), which we unfortunately cannot share. However, we uploaded our anonymized quantitative data set to OSF where they will be accessible to other researchers. To prevent the risk of re-identifying participants due to the small sample size and specific nature of the questions, we followed the ethics committee's recommendation and removed certain socio-demographic data from the uploaded dataset. 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. Authors’ reply: Thank you for your remark. We have rechecked the reference list and confirm that our reference list is complete and correct; no changes have been necessary. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of PV to aid in emotional processing in comparison to other methods. The topic is interesting and innovative. Below are a few comments for consideration. Authors’ reply: Thank you very much for your appreciative and very constructive feedback! Methods 1. Please elaborate on the sample size calculation. Authors’ reply: We have to apologize, we missed to report our power analysis in our original submission. We added the following paragraph on our power calculation to the Methods section (Study design and participants): The optimal sample size of N=54 was determined by performing a power calculation with GPower 3.1 (medium effect size f = 0.25, alpha = 0.05, repeated measure ANOVA with 3 groups and 2 measurements, correlation among repeated measurements r = 0.5, 1-beta = 0.90). Results 1. Given the different age ranges and employment status, but small sample sizes, would this have an impact on the results? Authors’ reply: Thank you for your insightful question. Our hypotheses and analyses focus on the comparison of our study groups. Given that we randomized our participants and baseline analyses confirm that our randomization was successful (no between-group differences regarding socio-demographic variables were found), the range of age of age does not have impact on the interpretation of our findings. In the contrary, the broad age range in each of our study arms increases the representativeness of our sample. The increased number of students in our sample has impact on the generalizability of our findings. This problem has been discussed as limitation of our trial in the Discussion section (see p. 21). It does not have impact on the interpretation of our analyses of between-group effects, because here again, randomization was successful and there are no differences in employment status between our study arms. REVIEWER #1 Reviewer #1: Thank you for having me review this manuscript. The work is in the important field of psychology and the manuscript is well written. This complements the growing knowledge about the photovoice approach. A few comments to improve the manuscript here below: Authors’ reply: Thank you very much for your appreciative and very constructive feedback! Abstract. 1. Please add information about gender and mean age. For mean age, provide its standard deviation. Authors’ reply: Thank you for your feedback. We have updated the manuscript as suggested and included the information on gender and mean age to the abstract. Discussion. 1. Please add further clarification to the limitations section. Your sample included highly educated participants, most of whom were students. Moreover, you had fewer male participants, which could imply an insufficient heterogeneity of the sample. Authors’ reply: Thank you for the valuable feedback. We have revised the relevant section and further emphasized the limitations of the representativeness of our sample (see p. 21): The perspectives and experiences of highly educated participants likely differ significantly from those of other social groups, which may also be reflected in the language and emotions they express. The lack of representativeness or our sample regarding educational level and gender limits the generalizability of our results. This highlights the need to replicate the study in other samples to capture a wider spectrum of experiences and emotions. Conclusion. 1. From line 503, page 23 to line 515, page 23 you are talking about implications. Please add the implications section. Authors’ reply: Thank you for pointing this out. You are absolutely right that this section addresses the implications. We have revised the title to clarify that the implications are discussed in this place. 2. In the conclusion section, please describe your findings more specifically. Authors’ reply: Thank you for your feedback. We have revised the Conclusion section to present the findings in a more specific way. The updated paragraph encompassing our conclusions can be found on page 23. We hope this provides a more specific summary of the results. REVIEWER #2 Reviewer #2: Its a good topic of research. Following are some observations: Authors’ reply: Thank you very much for your appreciative and very helpful feedback! Don't use full stop in the title. Authors’ reply: We have revised the title according to your suggestions and removed the full stop. The title reads now as: Using Photovoice to facilitate the report of emotions in an interview setting: An experimental study Were universally same emotions were checked? Authors’ reply: Thank you for this interesting comment. We did not explicitly examine universal emotions. The software we used (LIWC) identifies emotion words and counts the frequency of positive and negative emotion words, but it does not distinguish between universal and culturally specific emotions. It would be an interesting research question to explore whether photovoice has a specific impact on universal emotions. However, our sample was very homogeneous regarding cultural background, meaning that our data set is probably not appropriate to examine specific effects on universal emotions. Our study focuses on whether the report of any type of emotions was facilitated. In future research, with a more culturally diverse sample, we could investigate differential effects of Photovoice on the report of universal and culturally specific emotions. Validity of BFI was already established? Authors’ reply: Thank you for this important comment. The article published by Rammstedt and John (2007) specifies the validity of the BFI . The researchers concluded that the “results indicate that the BFI-10 scales retain significant levels of reliability and validity”. Due to space constraints and the need for consistency, we have not listed the validity of each questionnaire individually. However, readers of our manuscript are referred to the article by Rammstedt and John in the reference list of our manuscript. Which software has been used to analyze data? Authors’ reply: Thank you for your question to clarify how we analyzed our data. Statistical analyses were conducted using the software R Version 4.1.2 The reference is: R Core Team. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing; 2022. We added this information to our manuscript on page 12. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Photovoice_Response to Reviewers.docx* https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0322055.r003
16 Mar 2025 Decision Letter - Cho Lee Wong, Editor Using Photovoice to facilitate the report of emotions in an interview setting: An experimental study PONE-D-23-40707R1 Dear Dr. Studer, 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, Cho Lee Wong, 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 #3: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #4: 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 #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: 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 #3: Yes Reviewer #4: 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 #3: Yes Reviewer #4: 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 #3: (No Response) Reviewer #4: All earlier recommendations were revised, making the manuscript more clear, especially the methods and limitations. ****** 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 #3: No Reviewer #4: No ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0322055.r004
Formally Accepted
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