PONE-D-25-14004A life course perspective on predictors of midlife socioeconomic statusPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Mortensen,

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PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments:

In addition to the comments from the 2 reviewers, please consider the following:

1. Please review the PLOS One guidelines for statistical reporting and ensure that the manuscript complies (e.g., exact p values when greater than 0.001, confidence intervals etc): https://www.equator-network.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/SAMPL-Guidelines-3-13-13.pdf

2. Please also consider guidelines for SEM analysis and ensure that all relevant details are included in the manuscript (e.g., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anr.2021.06.001). It may help to review how other SEM-based papers in PLOS One have reported their findings. It seems that a path analysis diagram showing the direct and indirect effects is warranted, and may also help illustrate the "trajectories of influence" that the authors mention in their conclusion. In general, for a non-SEM expert, I found it difficult to follow the results and in their current form, some of the tables cannot stand alone from the text as it isn't clear what values are presented.

3. Please provide the rationale for only including father's occupational class.

4. Page 11, Line 16: What preliminary analyses were conducted and where are these reported?

5. Table 1: In the footnote, the authors mention 3 occupational class variables but I only see 2 listed in the table.

6. Page 5, Line 22: Consider clarifying that you are referring to adult height in this sentence.

7. Page 21, Lines 22-24: Regarding the statement that education, intelligence, parental education and father's occupational class have the largest influence, was there a threshold value for determining that a variable had a large influence? With the total effect of 0.59, I see that education is a strong predictor, but the other three are 0.16-0.19, and these are closer in magnitude to the other predictors (0.03-0.09).

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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

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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

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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

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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:  This is a simple and nice paper. It's greatest strength is the use of Danish longitudinal data. As I understand, this data set has so far not been used to study the topic of status attainment and social mobility. It's good that the authors report zero-order correlations, in addition to the more complex path analyses.

A few comments for improvement:

You measure social class by 5 categories, but you never name these 5 categories. I think you should list the class categories, which were used.

On page 23 you say that you used a reflective measurement model, although a formative model would have been better. Please explain the difference between reflective and formative model, why a formative model would have been better and why weren't you able to use it.

Table 4 is a bit unclear. Which variables in the table are dependent variables and which are predictor? What are the numbers in the table - correlations or path coefficients?

Reviewer #2:  Review:

I read this paper with great interest, and believe it has the potential to become a widely referenced source on the important topic of life course influences on adult socio-economic status. I will mention some of the important aspects of the paper that make it likely to become a widely referenced source, followed by a few suggestions that might improve the impact of the study and the clarity of the manuscript.

1. This is a well conducted replication and extension of previous studies: It replicates main consistent findings in the literature, and extends these to a relatively large, new population, context, and age cohort, with a broad range of childhood SES backgrounds. In addition there are important new features here: e.g., the multiple time points for prediction to mid adulthood (early childhood, later childhood, early adulthood); the addition of a range of predictors that have not been widely examined (these typically show small direct effects, but are important mediators of earlier predictors); and, most importantly, the focus on indirect effects and mediation of established predictors.

2. This design allows for comparison of the relative effect sizes (both direct and indirect) of predictors. It will therefore be a useful reference for future studies with other cohorts.

3. Studies directly focused on prediction of mid-adult SES are relatively unusual (often SES is considered as a predictor or control variable in longitudinal designs rather than an outcome). As the effects of the “established” predictors appear to vary somewhat across populations, contexts, etc. it is important to add to the body of literature with additional projects with different populations, contexts, age cohorts etc. so that this variability of results can be interpreted and understood. The importance of replication in a research area which is largely observational is well established.

4. This design allows identification of important “intermediate” outcomes that may be more amenable to intervention and policy decisions than the established predictors (e.g. parental education, occupational status, childhood IQ).

There are some limitations in the present paper based on the data set, which are well identified and stated in the manuscript. Most important of these are the limitations of using a single sex (male) which was available from the original sample, and some limitations in the type of predictive measures which were available from the data set (as described in the paper).

My main concern regarding limitations is that moderation effects were not reported. In addition to mediation, moderation is likely to be a main source of variance in this type of analyses. The authors explain that it would require an entire additional manuscript and analysis to examine these, but I would argue that we only have “half the story” here. It is an extremely interesting and potentially useful “half story” and so will be of broad interest to readers, but from both conceptual and applied/policy perspectives, the moderation processes should be considered as well. Could there be an appendix, or a related/complementary paper made available from the data set?

A minor specific issue: Please explain why weighted loadings were used for occupational status and income (p.9, ln.19). This influenced the results, as stated, but we don’t know what the rationale was….

In sum, I would like to know more about the interaction effects (moderation) in this or a complementary report. However, I am very impressed with the information and design presented here. I think it has the potential to be widely read and replicated, as well as used for social and educational policy development.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes:  Lisa A. Serbin, Professor of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

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Submitted filename: review .docx

A life course perspective on predictors of midlife socioeconomic status

PONE-D-25-14004R1

Dear Dr. Mortensen,

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.

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Kind regards,

Heather Macdonald, Ph.D

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Thank you for addressing my comments and those of the reviewers.

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 #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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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

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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

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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: All good. I have no further complaints. Nothing much to add. But I have to keep writing to attain the count.

Reviewer #2: The authors have been very responsive to reviewer and editor comments. I believe the paper is ready to publish.

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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:  Lisa A. Serbin, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

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