Relationship quality and mental health during COVID-19 lockdown

Christoph Pieh; Teresa O´Rourke; Sanja Budimir; Thomas Probst

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0238906

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMay 22, 2020
20 Jul 2020 Decision Letter - Ali Montazeri, Editor PONE-D-20-15368 Relationship quality and mental health during COVID-19 lockdown in Austria PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Pieh, 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 Sep 03 2020 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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Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Ali Montazeri Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional 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 2. Please amend either the title on the online submission form (via Edit Submission) or the title in the manuscript so that they are identical. [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: Partly Reviewer #2: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: N/A 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: 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: - What is the justification for the study sample size? - Is four weeks enough for observing mental health events? What is justification for choosing this time period? - Please provide sufficient explanations regarding the Austrian versions of the tools used. - It is necessary to accurately assess the value of statistical tests on the relationship between variables by a statistician. Reviewer #2: PONE-D-20-15368 The manuscript entitled ‘Relationship quality and mental health during COVID-19 lockdown in Austria’ aimed to evaluate the effect of relationship quality on mental health and well-being indicators in Austria during COVID-19 lockdown. The methodology needs improvements. I have provided some comments as follows: - Were there eligibility criteria including exclusion or inclusion criteria? - No match between the sample size mentioned in study sample (1000) and the result (1009). - The sample of your study are people who were in quarantine, and they were asked to fill out 7 questionnaires, what was the response rate? All 1009 completed the questionnaires without missing one? Is this ethical to administer 7 questionnaires? - What was your definition of mental health indicators? - Please don’t report results in the method like study sample subheading! - Please don’t compare the result of your study with another as you mentioned in result line 6. - Please don’t re-mention the results in discussion. ****** 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: No [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/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238906.r001
Revision 1
11 Aug 2020 Author Response Response to reviewer comments Reviewer #1: What is the justification for the study sample size? • To obtain a representative population sample according to age, gender, education, and region we specified the sample size a priori with a minimum of 1000 participants. Qualtrics then provided us with the final sample of N=1005 participants. We clarified the consideration for this decision within the manuscript. Is four weeks enough for observing mental health events? What is justification for choosing this time period? • We chose this time period, because all the used scales relate to the last two or four weeks. However, mental health events can occur delayed and we can´t make a statement about it. We added this limitation in the manuscript. As we observed significantly effects on mental health, the investigation does not appear to have been carried out too early. Please provide sufficient explanations regarding the Austrian versions of the tools used. • All used questionnaires (WHO-QOL BREF, WHO-5, PHQ-9, GAD-7, PSS-10, and ISI) are validated in German language and references are provided. It is necessary to accurately assess the value of statistical tests on the relationship between variables by a statistician. • Thanks for pointing this out. We have made statistical considerations and decided to calculate t-tests and variance analysis to analyze group differences instead of other statistical possibilities (e.g. regression analysis), because these methods are robust against violations of the respective requirements with large samples. • Thanks for your feedback to our manuscript! Reviewer #2: Were there eligibility criteria including exclusion or inclusion criteria? • As we were targeting for a representative population sample there were no specific exclusion or inclusion criteria. Participants were registered at the Qualtrics database and had to be in possession of and able to use a computer. We added this information in the limitations. No match between the sample size mentioned in study sample and the result. • Thanks for pointing this out, that was formulated somewhat misleadingly. The sample was specified a priori with a minimum of 1000 participants according to age, gender, education, and region. Qualtrics provided us with the final sample of N=1005. All of these participants were analyzed.” • Note: Four participants had to be excluded as they were test-participants from Qualtrics. Unfortunately, in our first analysis they were still included due to a misunderstanding between Qualtrics and us. We now recalculated the analysis with the final 1005 participants and corrected all scores throughout the manuscript. The exclusion of the 4 people resulted in no relevant changes in the results. The sample of your study are people who were in quarantine, and they were asked to fill out 7 questionnaires, what was the response rate? • Unfortunately, we do not know how many people were contacted by Qualtrics and therefore cannot report response rate. We highlighted this point in the limitations. All 1009 completed the questionnaires without missing one? • Correct! The online survey only allowed only to continue by answering all questions (forced choice answer format). As the participants got an expense allowance by completing all questionnaires of € 11,-, there are no missing items in the data set. Is this ethical to administer 7 questionnaires? • This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Danube University Krems (approval code: EK GZ 26/2018-2021) and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. To minimize the duration, we used only short-form questionnaires with mainly five to ten items. What was your definition of mental health indicators? • We wanted to investigate the effect of COVID 19 and relationship on the most prevalent mental health symptoms, such as depression, anxiety, insomnia, or stress, as well as Quality of Life and well-being. We then selected the questionnaires with good psychometric reference values, not too many items, validated in German language and widely used in research. Please don’t report results in the method like study sample subheading! • Thank you for this advice, we removed the mentioned results from the study sample subheading. Please don’t compare the result of your study with another as you mentioned in result line 6. • Thank you for pointing this out. We removed this comparison. Please don’t re-mention the results in discussion. • We are grateful for this comment and removed the re-mentioned results from the discussion. • Thank you for this constructive feedback and your considerations to improve the quality of our manuscript. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238906.r002
27 Aug 2020 Decision Letter - Ali Montazeri, Editor Relationship quality and mental health during COVID-19 lockdown PONE-D-20-15368R1 Dear Dr. Pieh, 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 for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, 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, Ali Montazeri Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): 1. If you indicate Qualtrics in the Methods would be more informative (Who they are?). 2. Perhaps if you integrate some explanations in the text (that you have provided for reviewers in response letter) would be better. For instance about missing data or similar. Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238906.r003
Formally Accepted
3 Sep 2020 Acceptance Letter - Ali Montazeri, Editor PONE-D-20-15368R1 Relationship quality and mental health during COVID-19 lockdown Dear Dr. Pieh: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. 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 plosone@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 Professor Ali Montazeri Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238906.r004

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