-->PONE-D-26-11567-->-->Internal and External Protective Factors Associated with the Secondary Traumatic Stress Component of Compassion Fatigue, in Feral Cat Caregivers-->-->PLOS One

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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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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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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: Dear Authors,

I have reviewed the manuscript entitled “Internal and External Protective Factors Associated with the Secondary Traumatic Stress Component of Compassion Fatigue in Feral Cat Caregivers.” Overall, I consider this to be a well-designed study addressing a relevant and timely topic. However, I believe several modifications would substantially improve the clarity and scientific value of the manuscript.

The manuscript is generally well written, particularly the Introduction section, which clearly contextualizes the problem and the rationale of the study. In addition, the Materials and Methods section is well described and easy to follow. In this section, it would be useful to specify the score ranges used to determine the levels of each questionnaire (e.g., low, moderate, or high levels). This would allow readers to interpret the results more easily and understand which scores correspond to “moderate” or “high” levels.

I would also strongly recommend including additional summary tables to help readers better understand the data presented.

In the Results section (page 9, line 224: “mostly women [164; 94%]”), I suggest including a summary table presenting the descriptive statistics for all questionnaire results, including means and standard deviations. The authors could also consider including medians and ranges (minimum–maximum values), if appropriate. For example, in line 256 the authors state that “most participants reported high perceived social support,” but no supporting numerical data are provided.

Regarding Figure 1, the presentation is somewhat confusing because percentages are not shown relative to the total study population, which makes interpretation more difficult.

There are also some minor language issues. In the tables, the expression “our mais” should probably read “or more.” Additionally, there appears to be a grammatical error in line 314.

Importantly, the statement in lines 316–318 requires an appropriate reference citation. More generally, the Discussion section lacks sufficient references and does not adequately compare the present findings with previous literature. I believe this entire section should be substantially revised and expanded.

Specifically, the authors should include references to previous studies on secondary traumatic stress and compassion fatigue in individuals working with animals, including veterinarians, shelter volunteers, animal rescue workers, and related professionals. There is currently a considerable body of literature on this topic, including recent studies identifying social support as a protective factor against compassion fatigue in animal-care professions. Including studies from Portugal and other countries would further strengthen the international relevance of the discussion.

Overall, I believe the study has merit and addresses an important issue, but the manuscript would benefit from a clearer presentation of the results and a more comprehensive, evidence-based discussion.

Sincerely,

Reviewer #2: Overall, I find this a very interesting and useful paper, and support its publication with some minor revisions.

Line 15: I think there’s a bit of a leap here between professionals with codes of conduct and many pressures and informal caregivers of cat colonies. Generally, informal caregivers are under-researched, let alone cat colony caregivers

Line 42 – Is compassion stress inevitable?

Line 74: The veterinary professional (no s)

Line 130: Provide reference 22 earlier, e.g. Resilience can be divided into four factors [22]: Perserverance…

Line 139: Likewise, provide reference 23 earlier, Spiritual well-being can be defined [23] as a dynamic

Line 139: I find this interesting, but I’m not sure I see the relevance here. Is it because this population is strongly spiritual? Can you make the relevance clearer to the reader?

Line 191 & Line 204: can you define these psychometric properties and what makes them good? E.g. do they show good coherence?

Line 218/Line285: It seems you have taken a content analysis style approach (or reliable thematic analysis) to the free text data. This needs to be outlined alongside your researcher positionality somewhere in the methods.

Line 224: ‘mostly women’ – specify how many, and give measure of variance like SD alongside mean age Similarly, provide percentage for statements like ‘majority were mployed’.

Line 226: This reads as though you have a single estimate of colony size for each respondent, which you later say you don’t. Can you be clearer as to how this was asked.

Line 230: Does it always follow that a larger colony is a higher caregiving burden? Presumably you don’t necessarily look after a large colony alone? (Even if you don’t engage with other caregivers they could still be supporting your colony?)

Line 232: Whose benchmarks are you using for your ‘acceptable’ and ‘good’ thresholds of Cronach’s alpha?

Line 242: Similarly, I would like reported mean, median, and ranges for your scores, and a better understanding of the thresholds for ‘high’ and ‘moderate’ etc. Some of this could be incorporated into figures.

Lines 261-284: You report the univariate and the multivariate models. Surely the univariate models are actually part of your overall model selection process? What value do you see in reporting them separately, because the moment that’s not clear to me, especially as they’re not narratively reported in the text. With regards to the multivariate model, why does your final model retain measures with no impact on the dependent variable? Is it not more parsimonious to remove those so you’re not spending degrees of freedom on modelling them? Prior to reporting the table, I would like a narrative report of the model (Younger, unemployed caregivers of colonies with more than 25 cats, lower Resilience scores, and lower family social support scores were more likely to have higher Secondary Traumatic Stress scoring) – you might find the ‘report’ package in R useful here (it’s one of my favourites) for actually giving us the effect size of each of these parameters which should be reported more clearly

Line 362 – The link between spiritual well being and this study still isn’t cl;ear to me

Line 367 – Requiring a telephone number likely excludes unhoused people? (Maybe that’s old fashioned of me)

Line 396 – really interesting

Stylistic note

I felt some of your paragraphs could do with more connections. We start about compassion fatigue, then jump to cat natural history, then start talking about one health approaches. At about Line 77 I would advise you to talk about one health and one welfare concepts, highlighting the relationship between people and animals, and then note that caregiver fatigue may extend beyond professionals caring for animals, but also to informal caregivers, and that this is relatively under-researched. You can then highlight cat colonies as an example of this, give the history of cat colonies and cats, and then move on to what you have in line 127ish

Jill MacKay

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes:  Jill R D MacKay

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<p>Internal and External Protective Factors Associated with the Secondary Traumatic Stress Component of Compassion Fatigue, in Feral Cat Caregivers

PONE-D-26-11567R1

Dear Dr. Santos,

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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Alejandro Botero Carvajal, Ph.D

Academic Editor

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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 #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

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

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: 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

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: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: My sincere apologies for the lateness of my review (my children, and then my wider family were struck with a stomach bug).

Thank you for the opportunity to review your paper again, and for your attention to my comments. It was a fascinating read, and I now endorse its publication.

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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.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes:  Jill R D MacKay

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