PONE-D-25-06259Differences in Housing Wealth between U.S. Military Service Personnel and the Civilian Population—Exploring the Role of Financial StressPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Loibl,

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Zhou Yu, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments:

Dear Authors,

I have completed the review. Based on the recommendations of the reviews, I decide to extend an opportunity to revise the manuscript. Here are some major concerns:

1. Context and Contribution: Strengthen the introduction by clearly outlining the research problem and the significance of findings.

2. Interpretation of Results: Expand on key findings, particularly the unexpected relationship between economic expectations and housing outcomes. Explain why lower economic expectations correlate with better housing outcomes.

3. Veteran Cohort Classification: Justify the categorization of military personnel into two broad cohorts, ensuring it accurately reflects differing military experiences and stressors. Have researchers used similar classification in the past? Further justify the choice of military personnel as the study population.

4. Financial Stress and Veteran Status: Address the inability to distinguish between active-duty personnel and veterans in the dataset and how this limitation impacts the conclusions. Are DoD civilian employees included in this analysis? Have you separately identified Reserve and National Guard Personnel?

5. Interpretation of Findings: "The odds of Korea/Vietnam Era military service personnel households owning a home is 4.23 times as large as the odds of civilian households owning a home (p<0.001).?" seems inconsistent with what is reported in the table.

6. Discussion Section: Enhance the discussion of statistically significant findings, particularly the role of demographic factors in housing disparities.

There are also minor concerns:

1. Clarity and Grammar: Revise the manuscript to correct grammatical errors and ensure sentence completion. For instance, please revise the sentence "The findings do not indicate that differences in financial stress between military and civilian households were associated with home equity accumulation." and make it more readable. Please revise "Vietnam Era military service personnel households had a positive but non-statistically significant relationship to home ownership?"

2. Introduction Structure: Revise the introduction for clarity and impact, ensuring the research question is presented explicitly.

3. Literature Review: More explicitly highlight the research gaps and how the study addresses them.

4. Methods Section: Consider relocating some data processing details to the appendix for improved readability.

5. Formatting Issues: Correct inconsistencies in table formatting, indentation, and citation styles.

6. Conclusion: Clearly articulate the study’s contributions, innovations, and future research directions. If this study has resolved conflicts in the literature, please state it clearly. Has the research discovered new things? The findings seem to reflect those of the whole population--being Black is associated with lower homeownership probabilities.

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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

Reviewer #3: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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: No

Reviewer #3: No

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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 manuscript is methodologically sound, concise, and focused. It examines differences in home ownership and housing equity between veterans and civilians and draws from economic frameworks to present clear hypotheses with logical relationships between outcome and explanatory variables. The manuscript, however, lacks context specifying the nature of the problem the authors hope to contribute to and the importance of their findings. Given the methodological strength, I suggest a re-submission.

1. The study analyzes secondary data from multiple sources. Its dependent variables come from the Survey of Consumer Finances, while its explanatory measure of financial stress comes from the National Financial Capability Study. This choice removes common method bias and increases the study’s internal validity. Its other explanatory variable, veteran status, is an objective measure and is unlikely to introduce bias to the results. The authors’ justification for their models and their explanation of their baseline specification is clear and well-reasoned.

2. The authors find support for just one of their four hypotheses – post-Vietnam era military households were associated with lower levels of home equity than civilian households, which the authors argue likely relates to the frequency of geographical re-locations for military members. Also among the key findings is a consistent, perhaps peculiar relationship between economic expectations and homeownership.

a. Logistic regression models 2 and 3 show that believing the economy would become worse in the next year was associated with a significantly higher likelihood of owning a home, and believing the economy would improve was associated with a significantly lower likelihood of owning a home. This effect partly holds in OLS Model 2, as worse economic expectations were associated with greater home equity.

b. This finding is intriguing, but the manuscript’s discussion does not interpret its meaning or value. The overall interpretation of the findings is lacking and limits the manuscripts’ contribution. This omission leads me to suggest a second submission. The paper is methodologically sound, and I believe the authors can bolster their discussion section in a revision.

3. While the authors clearly state the value of their findings in contrasting theoretical expectations on the relationship between military status and home ownership, they would benefit from interpreting the results that did yield statistical significance. For example, it is unclear why, in the authors’ minds, lower economic expectations are associated with better housing outcomes or why demographic factors (e.g., race) were consistently associated with negative outcomes. The latter finding may be more obvious, but the manuscript would benefit from a more robust discussion. The study’s rigor is a notable strength, and its methods are presented well, but the lack of interpretation does not allow for a clear conceptual or empirical takeaway.

These major concerns are located in the paper’s back end. The following minor concerns may also merit consideration.

1. The research question on page 4 is presented (grammatically) as a statement. Additionally and more importantly, the statement of the problem on page 4 (“Due to the critical role of housing wealth”) lacks impact. A clearer introduction of the relevant problem and a clearer statement of the first research question would help set a stronger foundation for the methods and results.

2. Perhaps this is a reader issue more than a writer issue, but I did not quite understand section 1.3 of the introduction. The bulk of the preceding content presents evidence about negative financial outcomes for veterans, but section 1.3 ends by vaguely noting financial outcomes have improved. This improvement would seem to contradict Hypothesis 2.

3. The paper is well-written throughout, but like any manuscript, there are minor issues to clean up. I only note the instances below because they did distract from my first read of the manuscript.

a. The paragraph at the top of page 8 (continued from page 7) is missing a verb after “descriptive analyses.”

b. At least one in-text citation is presented in parenthesis rather than brackets. I understand this note is pedantic. I include it because it did briefly disrupt the way I read the manuscript. On first glance, the (47) appeared as some sort of specification or clarification rather than a citation.

c. The “Predictor – financial stress” paragraph in section 2.2 includes an unnecessary indent. Table 1, just below this section, is formatted noticeably differently than the other tables in the manuscript.

Reviewer #2: This article presents interesting and important information regarding service member homeownership and equity attainment. The data analysis is described in a way that makes it easy to follow and choices about which data to include or exclude were described satisfactorily. The topic of the paper is interesting and presented in a way that is easily digestible.

However, there are some concerns with the hypothesis and some of the data choices.

The authors split military service personnel into two distinct cohorts. Those who served during the Vietnam/Korean war era, and those who served in the post-Vietnam era. Anyone 18 or older in 1973 was included in the Vietnam era, anyone younger than 18 was included in the post-Vietnam era. This likely leads to at least some people who were military age in 1973 but did not join the military until after the war being included in the Vietnam era cohort.

Military experiences and stressors have changed greatly from the end of the Vietnam war to the current era. Those who have served post-2001 have often seen much higher levels of combat, deployments, and stress than those who served between the Vietnam war and the war on terror. The authors should discuss why the broad range of the second cohort is appropriate.

Another concern is that in the literature review the authors explain that active-duty military members often have more financial stress than their civilian counterparts, but that military veterans have been found to be more financially stable. Given that there is no way in the survey data to differentiate active duty personnel from veterans, or those who served for 4 years from those who retired with a pension for that matter, it may be that the lower performance of active duty personnel combined with the higher performance of veterans worked together to show that there is no difference in homeownership or equity between service personnel and the civilian population. The authors should explain better why they came to the hypotheses that they came to given the information in the literature review.

Finally, there were at least two instances where sentences seemed to cut off in the middle and were left incomplete. This may be due to something being cut accidentally during the editing process. There are also several grammar errors throughout the manuscript that affect the readability of the article. The authors should go through and fill in the missing information and comb the narrative for grammar errors to increase the clarity of the paper.

This is an important topic, and the results point to interesting avenues for further research. I commend the authors for their work and for the interesting direction of their inquiry. With a little cleanup, I think this article can be made much stronger.

Reviewer #3: 1 There are grammatical inaccuracies in both the abstract and the main text; a thorough revision of the language is required.

2 It is recommended to streamline the introduction to avoid excessive information and ensure clarity.

3 The literature review should explicitly highlight the existing research gap.

4 The Methods section appears somewhat lengthy; it is advisable to relocate part of the data processing details to the appendix to improve readability.

5 The conclusion should more explicitly articulate the study’s contributions and innovations; additionally, it is recommended to include a paragraph outlining potential directions for future research.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes:  Robert Thomas Porter

Reviewer #3: No

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Submitted filename: Manuscript Review 3_16.docx

Differences in Housing Wealth between U.S. Military Service Personnel and the Civilian Population—Exploring the Role of Financial Stress

PONE-D-25-06259R1

Dear Dr. Loibl,

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.

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Kind regards,

Zhou Yu, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments: