Does lack of parental involvement affect school dropout among Indian adolescents? evidence from a panel study

Ronak Paul; Rashmi Rashmi; Shobhit Srivastava

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0251520

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionNovember 4, 2020
16 Feb 2021 Decision Letter - Srinivas Goli, Editor PONE-D-20-34729 Does Lack of Parental Involvement Affect School Dropout among Indian Adolescents? Evidence from a Panel Study PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Srivastava, 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. ============================== Revised and resubmit according to reviewer comments. Additionally, also look at heterogenous effects of the parental involvement by their educational standards and economic position. Parental involvement always not be in positive direction. Teacher and Parent meetings practice is mostly in private schools, thus there might be sample selection bias in the analyses. Kindly, examine this point as well. I will give my detailed comments once your respond to the reviewer comments. ============================== Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 02 2021 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. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. 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, Srinivas Goli, Ph.D. 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. We suggest you thoroughly copyedit your manuscript for language usage, spelling, and grammar. If you do not know anyone who can help you do this, you may wish to consider employing a professional scientific editing service. Whilst you may use any professional scientific editing service of your choice, PLOS has partnered with both American Journal Experts (AJE) and Editage to provide discounted services to PLOS authors. Both organizations have experience helping authors meet PLOS guidelines and can provide language editing, translation, manuscript formatting, and figure formatting to ensure your manuscript meets our submission guidelines. To take advantage of our partnership with AJE, visit the AJE website (http://learn.aje.com/plos/) for a 15% discount off AJE services. To take advantage of our partnership with Editage, visit the Editage website (www.editage.com) and enter referral code PLOSEDIT for a 15% discount off Editage services. If the PLOS editorial team finds any language issues in text that either AJE or Editage has edited, the service provider will re-edit the text for free. Upon resubmission, please provide the following: The name of the colleague or the details of the professional service that edited your manuscript A copy of your manuscript showing your changes by either highlighting them or using track changes (uploaded as a supporting information file) A clean copy of the edited manuscript (uploaded as the new manuscript file) 3. We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. 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. In your revised cover letter, please address the following prompts: 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 sensitive information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide. Additional Editor Comments: Considering the reviewer comments, I am going with a decision of major revision. Either your respond to reviewer comments or revise according to their suggestions. We would like to see a revised version of the paper. [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 Reviewer #3: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: 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: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: 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 Reviewer #3: 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: The study fills a gap in the current knowledge space. It will add to the existing database and inform policy makers. However, in order to make it more robust, the following are suggested: There could be certain concerns about the cohort size, as the adolescents were only about 50% of the original children covered. Although that seems to have been addressed, some more explanation of whether that skews the results in any manner can be made. Another issue worth flagging is that in India, a child completes class ten by the age of 16 years, or 17 at most. Thus, there is a natural drop out as it were, around that age. If a larger number of children in the cohort are grouped towards the 17-18 years band, they would in any case drop out; either for work, or lack of higher secondary schools or colleges nearby. This could skew the results, and needs to be addressed. Besides, distance is a major factor in parents not sending their children for higher education. It will add to the study if this can be addressed. The Right to Education Act in India addresses the entitlements of children up to 14 years. The authors could analyze whether this is a factor that comes into play in dropouts, as many benefits associated with the Act are not available after that age. The study has brought out the need for parental involvement in furthering the educational attainment of their children. Towards this end, some policy level suggestions can be incorporated. These could be structured parent teacher meetings, some activities for the family as a part of the “home work” etc. Even though the dropout rates from public schools are higher as brought out by the study, yet these recommendations/inputs, given in a structured manner, can help these schools have a greater stakeholder involvement, and create accountability for the teachers there. Reviewer #2: The topic selected was well discussed area in Indian and international literature and there is no need to prove this hypothesis again and again. It seems the authors have not mention about similar study findings in their literature survey. There is a similar Indian study which has been done using National Family Health Survey data (Karnataka Health Promotion Trust (KHPT), Bangalore, Gouda M, S., & Sekher, Dr. T. V. (2014). Factors Leading to School Dropouts in India: An Analysis of National Family Health Survey-3 Data. IOSR Journal of Research & Method in Education (IOSRJRME), 4(6), 75–83. https://doi.org/10.9790/7388-04637583). The findings seems to be very much similar to the current article. The data which were used were taken from a national data base and it appears that all the factors associated with school dropouts were not included. By just analysing the given factors and arriving at a conclusion is not really scientific. Though the article has been written well and statistical methods were used accurately, the content is not worth publishing in a peer reviewed journal. Reviewer #3: I appreciate the authors’ attention to strengthen the relationship between parental involvement in primary school and dropout in high school. This study fills up a research gap in the long-term consequence of parental involvement in children’s education, especially provides recommendations for the education policies in the local area. This study is a large-scale study based on two successive surveys 7 years apart, so the large-sampled size and the long following time are the advantages as a panel study. However, the authors wrote a little more on the value of the study and control variables effecting dropout and didn’t take advantage of the data of stratified analysis in the discussion part. I also suggest that more work in analyzing the data of parenting variables in the result part need to do and more literatures support that in the discussion to enrich the article. Meanwhile this article doesn’t provide ethical claim and information of data quality control as a large-size sampled study. I have made some additional notes below in the event the authors wish to revise the article. Abstract The sentence “Additionally, the study provides evidence of……” (Line 38-40) should not presented in the introduction, and it should be integrated with the sentence “Further, a similar relationship was observed ……” (Line 48-49) in the results. The results in the abstract need to present the data of stratified analysis. Methods The Round-I and Round-II data were all from India Human Development Survey, and the cited references are available in a website. However, the information of informed consent and quality control are hard to find from the website, so the authors should also present them in the manuscript. There are three binary indicators for parental involvement, but there should be more definition of parental involvement, for example, how many times within a year or how long per involvement, et al. Results Line 238-242: the contents belong to “Data source”, and they are advised to be located after Line 135-141. The inclusion standard of dropout should be presented in “Outcome variables”. Figure 1 is suggested to be deleted. Table 2 has the similar variables with Table 3 and should be merged to Table 3. It’s a long list of presented variables and this will make readers confused to compare the two tables. In Table 3, class performance, grade repetition, type of school, household wealth and type of community et al are factors influencing school dropout besides parental involvement indicators, and the results show the importance of all the significant factors, rather than only parental involvement. So if the authors want to emphasize the of parental involvement is more important than other significant factors, more data need to support it. Table 4-6 are suggested to be merged into one table for more readability. More details about the stratified analysis should be provided, and rates of parental involvement in different gender, type of school and type of community are recommended to be presented. Discussion Line 370-393: it’s nonbusiness with the relationship of parental involvement and school dropout, and it seems to weaken the importance of parental involvement. More literatures are suggested to be cited for discussing the results of stratified analysis and interpreting how parental involvement affects dropout in different gender, type of school and type of community. Conclusion The present results support the importance of parental involvement, and further conclusions, such as meaningful parental involvement (Line 426), should be supported by more 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? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes:** Mahesh Kumbukage Reviewer #3: 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. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: plos review.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251520.r001
Revision 1
3 Mar 2021 Author Response MANUSCRIPT NUMBER: PONE-D-20-34729 SUBJECT: Response to reviewers Dear Dr. Srinivas Goli, Thank you for giving us the opportunity of submitting an improved version of our manuscript titled “Does Lack of Parental Involvement Affect School Dropout among Indian Adolescents? Evidence from a Panel Study”, for publication in the PLOS One-Journal. We are also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. We appreciate the time and effort that you and the reviewers have put forward to provide valuable feedback towards the improvement of our paper. Kindly note, that we have incorporated all of the changes that were suggested by the reviewers. The modifications have been highlighted in yellow within the revised manuscript. A final version of manuscript has also been provided. Please see below for a point-by-point response to the each of individual reviewer’s comments and suggestions. Yours Sincerely, Authors EDITOR COMMENTS TO AUTHORS Revised and resubmit according to reviewer comments. Additionally, also look at heterogeneous effects of the parental involvement by their educational standards and economic position. Parental involvement always not be in positive direction. Teacher and Parent meetings practice is mostly in private schools, thus there might be sample selection bias in the analyses. Kindly, examine this point as well. I will give my detailed comments once your respond to the reviewer comments. Response: Dear sir, I completely agree with your comment. We have done stratified analysis in the present study to examine the heterogeneity. Yes, Teacher and Parent meetings practice is mostly in private schools, thus there might be sample selection bias in the analyses. This was controlled in stratified analysis in table-4. REVIEWER COMMENTS TO AUTHORS Reviewer #1: The study fills a gap in the current knowledge space. It will add to the existing database and inform policy makers. However, in order to make it more robust, the following are suggested: There could be certain concerns about the cohort size, as the adolescents were only about 50% of the original children covered. Although that seems to have been addressed, some more explanation of whether that skews the results in any manner can be made. Response: We agree with the reviewer than more explanation regarding factors associated with censoring of observation in the panel dataset is necessary. Accordingly, we have added the following explanation: We observed that percentage difference of children by demographic, socio-economic and geographic characteristics was similar between the cross-sectional and panel datasets. Only percentage distribution by age of the children (in years) varied by more than 2% between the two datasets. Another issue worth flagging is that in India, a child completes class ten by the age of 16 years, or 17 at most. Thus, there is a natural drop out as it were, around that age. If a larger number of children in the cohort are grouped towards the 17-18 years band, they would in any case drop out; either for work, or lack of higher secondary schools or colleges nearby. This could skew the results, and needs to be addressed. Besides, distance is a major factor in parents not sending their children for higher education. It will add to the study if this can be addressed. Response: We completely agree with the reviewer’s assertion that there is a natural dropout at the 17-18 years age band. The same is observed from Table-2 of this paper, where children aged 11-12 in round-I faced higher dropout when they became 17-18 during round-II (in comparison to their counterparts in the 8-9 band during round-I). Accordingly, to adjust for this effect we have included age of the children (in years) as a control dummy in the logistic regression models. We also agree with the reviewer that distance is a major factor behind parents not sending their children to schools. However, IHDS has collected data of distance of commonly used local school from the community (selected). We found no way to understand whether all children in a community attended the same school. Therefore, to avoid ecological fallacy we did not include distance as an independent variable in our study. However, we have cited this as a limitation of our study (381-383): The Right to Education Act in India addresses the entitlements of children up to 14 years. The authors could analyze whether this is a factor that comes into play in dropouts, as many benefits associated with the Act are not available after that age. Response: We agree with the suggestion of reviewer. And accordingly, we have also mentioned the benefits of act on children during primary education, in our introduction section. Prior discussing how the dropout rate had increased during secondary schooling. However, there is no such data available in the survey which can show that this affects their dropout status. So, as per the reviewer’s suggestion we have cited this as a limitation. The text in the limitation section reads as follows: We were not able to capture the effect of Right to Education act entitled for under 15 years age children on their dropout status in later ages due to unavailability of data in survey. The study has brought out the need for parental involvement in furthering the educational attainment of their children. Towards this end, some policy level suggestions can be incorporated. These could be structured parent teacher meetings, some activities for the family as a part of the “home work” etc. Even though the dropout rates from public schools are higher as brought out by the study, yet these recommendations/inputs, given in a structured manner, can help these schools have a greater stakeholder involvement, and create accountability for the teachers there. Response: As per the reviewer’s suggestion, we have included this as our policy recommendation in the manuscript. The text reads as follows: A structured implementation of policies which would help in holding parent-teacher meets, activities for the family as a part of homework, involvement of parents during child education etc are required to create a healthy environment among children-parents-teachers. Reviewer #2: The topic selected was well discussed area in Indian and international literature and there is no need to prove this hypothesis again and again. Response: Thank you for the suggestion. However, we respectfully disagree with the reviewer’s comment and would like to apologize if we were unable to convey our concept. We would like to mention that, although the concept of parental involvement in adolescent’s education have been widely shown in developed and developing countries. But such an idea is merely discussed in Indian context. The limited literature present shows a cross-sectional view of the scenario. The panel structure of our study itself adds the relevance of the paper. It seems the authors have not mention about similar study findings in their literature survey. There is a similar Indian study which has been done using National Family Health Survey data (Karnataka Health Promotion Trust (KHPT), Bangalore, Gouda M, S., & Sekher, Dr. T. V. (2014). Factors Leading to School Dropouts in India: An Analysis of National Family Health Survey-3 Data. IOSR Journal of Research & Method in Education (IOSRJRME), 4(6), 75–83. https://doi.org/10.9790/7388-04637583). The findings seems to be very much similar to the current article. Response: Thank you for the suggestion. However, we would respectfully like to mention that our manuscript has already discussed the above-mentioned paper written by Dr TV Sekher and M.S. Gouda. Although this literature using National Family Health Survey had helps us to provide various basic evidences, but as mentioned earlier it provides only a cross-sectional view of the scenario. And the present manuscript provides the long-term consequences of lack in parental involvement. You would be delighted to know we had the opportunity to discuss the current paper with Prof TV Sekher (we happen to work in the same institute). He had deemed the paper to address to crucial research gap. The data which were used were taken from a national data base and it appears that all the factors associated with school dropouts were not included. By just analysing the given factors and arriving at a conclusion is not really scientific. Response: Our study does not claim any causal effect but provides an idea how the parental involvement in primary level schooling is associated with the adolescent’s education outcome. And due to restriction in the information available in the data, all the factors might not able to be captured. Though the article has been written well and statistical methods were used accurately, the content is not worth publishing in a peer reviewed journal. Response: Dear sir, Thank you for the complement over our paper. I hope the changes made by us in the manuscript will make it worth publishing in a peer reviewed journal. Reviewer #3: I appreciate the authors’ attention to strengthen the relationship between parental involvement in primary school and dropout in high school. This study fills up a research gap in the long-term consequence of parental involvement in children’s education, especially provides recommendations for the education policies in the local area. This study is a large-scale study based on two successive surveys 7 years apart, so the large-sampled size and the long following time are the advantages as a panel study. However, the authors wrote a little more on the value of the study and control variables effecting dropout and didn’t take advantage of the data of stratified analysis in the discussion part. I also suggest that more work in analyzing the data of parenting variables in the result part need to do and more literatures support that in the discussion to enrich the article. Meanwhile this article doesn’t provide ethical claim and information of data quality control as a large-size sampled study. I have made some additional notes below in the event the authors wish to revise the article. Abstract The sentence “Additionally, the study provides evidence of……” (Line 38-40) should not presented in the introduction, and it should be integrated with the sentence “Further, a similar relationship was observed ……” (Line 48-49) in the results. The results in the abstract need to present the data of stratified analysis. Response: Thank you for the suggestion. As per the reviewer’s suggestion, changes have been duly incorporated in the manuscript. Methods The Round-I and Round-II data were all from India Human Development Survey, and the cited references are available in a website. However, the information of informed consent and quality control are hard to find from the website, so the authors should also present them in the manuscript. There are three binary indicators for parental involvement, but there should be more definition of parental involvement, for example, how many times within a year or how long per involvement, et al. Response: We thank the reviewer for pointing out that the information on informed consent and data quality are hard to find from the website. Please note that the information on informed consent are available in the questionnaires of respective rounds of IHDS which can be downloaded along with the datasets (Desai et al., 2008; Desai & Vanneman, 2015). Further, information on data quality is separately available in the IHDS website (Desai et al., 2009). Furthermore, to accommodate your suggestion we have also modified the data availability information in the manuscript (line 130-134): IHDS adopted a stratified random sampling survey design and informed consent were obtained from all the interviewee. Further details regarding survey description, sampling design and data quality can be found elsewhere (Sonalde Desai et al., 2009, 2010, 2015). Additional information on informed consent is available from the survey questionnaires available from the IHDS website (Sonalde Desai et al., 2008; Sonalde Desai & Vanneman, 2015). Results Line 238-242: the contents belong to “Data source”, and they are advised to be located after Line 135-141. Response: According to the reviewer’s suggestion we have relocated the marked-up sentences (line 144-146). The inclusion standard of dropout should be presented in “Outcome variables”. Response: Thank you for pointing this out. We have given the inclusion criteria for school dropout as (line): We have included only those children who were enrolled in a school during round-I. Figure 1 is suggested to be deleted. Response: According to the reviewer’s suggestion Figure 1 has been omitted. Table 2 has the similar variables with Table 3 and should be merged to Table 3. It’s a long list of presented variables and this will make readers confused to compare the two tables. Response: Thank you for the suggestion. Accordingly, we have merged Tables 2 and 3 into a single table named Table 2 below line 259. In Table 3, class performance, grade repetition, type of school, household wealth and type of community et al are factors influencing school dropout besides parental involvement indicators, and the results show the importance of all the significant factors, rather than only parental involvement. So, if the authors want to emphasize the of parental involvement is more important than other significant factors, more data need to support it. Response: Dear sir, we have only limited information available in dataset regarding the variables related to parental involvement. Table 4-6 are suggested to be merged into one table for more readability. More details about the stratified analysis should be provided, and rates of parental involvement in different gender, type of school and type of community are recommended to be presented. Response: According to the reviewer’s suggestion we have merged tables 4-6 into a single table. Further we have also provided the rates of parental involvement by gender, type of school and type of community in Table-3. In the present manuscript, more information is provided while explaining these tables. Discussion Line 370-393: it’s non-business with the relationship of parental involvement and school dropout, and it seems to weaken the importance of parental involvement. Response: Dear sir, I agree with your comment. But apart from parental involvement there are other factors to which are associated with school dropouts. Therefore, the first paragraph on the discussion was extensively discussed in accordance to the main objective of the paper and additionally, we tried to discuss other factors also which were significantly associated with school dropout among adolescents in India. More literatures are suggested to be cited for discussing the results of stratified analysis and interpreting how parental involvement affects dropout in different gender, type of school and type of community. Response: Few literatures from India had so far shown differential in these stratified fields, however these were restricted to certain state only. These evidences were also discussed previously in our manuscript. Although we have included a sentence in the introduction section to brief the evidence. Conclusion The present results support the importance of parental involvement, and further conclusions, such as meaningful parental involvement (Line 426), should be supported by more data. Response: Dear sir, we have only limited information available in dataset regarding the variables related to parental involvement. References Desai, S., Dubey, A., Joshi, B. L., Sen, M., Sharif, A., & Vanneman, R. (2009). India Human Development Survey: Design and Data Quality. University of Maryland and National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi. https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/DSDR/idhs-data-guide.html Desai, S., & Vanneman, R. (2015). India Human Development Survey-II (IHDS-II), 2011-12: Version 6 [Data set]. Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36151.V6 Desai, S., Vanneman, R., & National Council Of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi. (2008). India Human Development Survey (IHDS), 2005: Version 12 [Data set]. Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR22626.V12 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251520.r002
7 Apr 2021 Decision Letter - Srinivas Goli, Editor PONE-D-20-34729R1 Does Lack of Parental Involvement Affect School Dropout among Indian Adolescents? Evidence from a Panel Study PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Srivastava, 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. ============================== ACADEMIC EDITOR: Considering reviewers opinion and my own reading, I am recommending a minor revision for this article. A part from reviewers comments, please address following comments from me: 1. In its current form, your discussion and conclusions looks mere superficial inferences without a proper understanding of Primary school education system, its characteristics and composition in India. I suggest to look at the following paper using the same data source which interpreted the characteristics of primary school education in India and how it is different by ownership types. Without understanding these dynamics, it is very difficult to suggest implications from your analyses. For instance, the special clause which is already mentioned in the existing flagship program like Sarva Siksha Abhiyan and right of children to free and compulsory education act, to strengthening community participation by forming village education committee (VEC) for the monitoring of the teachers’ activities as well as for the planning of infrastructure development. So, your suggestions should fit in existing structure for both government and private schools. Going by current composition, 70% of all school children are government where you don’t have proper set-up for parent and teacher interaction so one-way to involve them is through VEC system. You must try to understand the existing system for making policy recommendations. Please refer to below paper. Gouda J, Das KC, Goli S, Pou LM. Government versus private primary schools in India. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. 2013, Vol. 34(1/2), pp 708-724. file://uniwa.uwa.edu.au/userhome/staff1/00102521/Downloads/GovernmentversusPrivateprimaryschoolsinIndia.pdf ============================== Please submit your revised manuscript by May 22 2021 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. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. 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. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Srinivas Goli, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: 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 (if provided): Considering reviewers opinion and my own reading, I am recommending a minor revision for this article. A part from reviewers comments, please address following comments from me. 1. In its current form, your discussion and conclusions looks mere superficial inferences without a proper understanding of Primary school education system, its characteristics and composition in India. I suggest to look at the following paper using the same data source which interpreted the characteristics of primary school education in India and how it is different by ownership types. Without understanding these dynamics, it is very difficult to suggest implications from your analyses. For instance, the special clause which is already mentioned in the existing flagship program like Sarva Siksha Abhiyan and right of children to free and compulsory education act, to strengthening community participation by forming village education committee (VEC) for the monitoring of the teachers’ activities as well as for the planning of infrastructure development. So, your suggestions should fit in existing structure for both government and private schools. Going by current composition, 70% of all school children are government where you don’t have proper set-up for parent and teacher interaction so one-way to involve them is through VEC system. You must try to understand the existing system for making policy recommendations. Please refer to below paper. Gouda J, Das KC, Goli S, Pou LM. Government versus private primary schools in India. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. 2013, Vol. 34(1/2), pp 708-724. file://uniwa.uwa.edu.au/userhome/staff1/00102521/Downloads/GovernmentversusPrivateprimaryschoolsinIndia.pdf [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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 #2: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #3: (No Response) ******** 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 #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: 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 #2: Yes Reviewer #3: 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 #2: Yes Reviewer #3: 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 #2: The earlier comments were addressed by the author. As the author has justified the reason for the publication, it is justifiable to publish this article Reviewer #3: Thank your for your response, but still I have a concern. Since this paper focused on parental involvement, information of parenting should be addressed more. Otherwise, the title of this paper was only to attract attentions. Lack of further definition of parental involvement, such as how many times performed within a year or how long spent per involvement, should be presented as 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 #2: Yes:** Mahesh Kumbukage Reviewer #3: 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.0251520.r003
Revision 2
12 Apr 2021 Author Response Editor Comments Considering reviewers opinion and my own reading, I am recommending a minor revision for this article. A part from reviewers’ comments, please address following comments from me. 1. In its current form, your discussion and conclusions looks mere superficial inferences without a proper understanding of Primary school education system, its characteristics and composition in India. I suggest to look at the following paper using the same data source which interpreted the characteristics of primary school education in India and how it is different by ownership types. Without understanding these dynamics, it is very difficult to suggest implications from your analyses. For instance, the special clause which is already mentioned in the existing flagship program like Sarva Siksha Abhiyan and right of children to free and compulsory education act, to strengthening community participation by forming village education committee (VEC) for the monitoring of the teachers’ activities as well as for the planning of infrastructure development. So, your suggestions should fit in existing structure for both government and private schools. Going by current composition, 70% of all school children are government where you don’t have proper set-up for parent and teacher interaction so one-way to involve them is through VEC system. You must try to understand the existing system for making policy recommendations. Please refer to below paper. Gouda J, Das KC, Goli S, Pou LM. Government versus private primary schools in India. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. 2013, Vol. 34(1/2), pp 708-724. file://uniwa.uwa.edu.au/userhome/staff1/00102521/Downloads/GovernmentversusPrivateprimaryschoolsinIndia.pdf Response: We are thankful to receive your suggestions. Accordingly, we have incorporated changes in discussion and conclusion section (Page 18, Line 349; Page 20, Line 401). Reviewer #3: Thank you for your response, but still I have a concern. Since this paper focused on parental involvement, information of parenting should be addressed more. Otherwise, the title of this paper was only to attract attentions. Lack of further definition of parental involvement, such as how many times performed within a year or how long spent per involvement, should be presented as limitations. Response: Dear Reviewer, Thank you for your suggestion. We have tried to use the best possible variable available in the data about the parent’s involvement in child learning process. We agree with your suggestion that quality variables like number of times these activities were performed and the time of involvement are the essential factors. But due to unavailability of these information in data, we have included this as the limitation. The text in the discussion section reads as follows (Page 19, Line 381): Although factors like number of times and for how much time such involvement were observed also matter while observing the parental involvement. Unavailability of such information in the survey restricts the dimension. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251520.r004
19 Apr 2021 Decision Letter - Srinivas Goli, Editor PONE-D-20-34729R2 Does Lack of Parental Involvement Affect School Dropout among Indian Adolescents? Evidence from a Panel Study PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Srivastava, 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. ============================== ACADEMIC EDITOR: Before recommending this paper, I suggest authors to format their paper according to PLOS One guidelines. References are not in PLOS format. Give full details of newly cited reference. Convert all in text reference citation to numbers. Language need to be proof read once, especially for the newly added portions. PLOS one editorial central alerting me that this is a duplicate submission. Are you submitted the same paper in PLOS One or to the any other journal. ============================== Please submit your revised manuscript by Jun 03 2021 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. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. 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. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Srinivas Goli, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: 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 (if provided): Before recommending this paper, I suggest authors to format their paper according to PLOS One guidelines. References are not in PLOS format. Give full details of newly cited reference. Convert all in text reference citation to numbers. Language need to be proof read once, especially for the newly added portions. PLOS one editorial central alerting me that this is a duplicate submission. Are you submitted the same paper in PLOS One or to the any other journal. [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.0251520.r005
Revision 3
25 Apr 2021 Author Response 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. Response: Thank you for pointing this out. Indeed, we manually reviewed the reference list and checked for the presence of retracted articles. We found no retracted articles in the manuscript. Additional Editor Comments: 1. Before recommending this paper, I suggest authors format their paper according to PLOS One guidelines. Response: Dear Editor, thank you for pointing this out. We have formatted the paper according to the PLOS One guidelines. Formatting changes have been shown in the “Revised manuscript with Track Changes”. 2. References are not in PLOS format. Give full details of the newly cited reference. Convert all in-text reference citation to numbers. Response: Dear Editor, thank you for pointing this out. We have modified the references according to the PLOS One format. Further to improve the veracity of our findings we included the following reference in the Discussion section: Gouda J, Das KC, Goli S, Pou LMA. Government versus private primary schools in India. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. 2013. Further, we have converted all in-text citations to numbers. 3. Language needs to be proofread once, especially for the newly added portions. Response: Thank you for pointing this out. Accordingly, we have proofread the final manuscript. All changes from proofreading have been shown in the “Revised manuscript with Track Changes”. 4. PLOS one editorial central alerting me that this is a duplicate submission. Have you submitted the same paper in PLOS One or to any other journal? Response: We reconfirm that the same paper has neither been submitted to PLOS One nor any other journal. However, an older version of the paper was sent for the PAA Annual Seminar 2021. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251520.r006
28 Apr 2021 Decision Letter - Srinivas Goli, Editor Does Lack of Parental Involvement Affect School Dropout among Indian Adolescents? Evidence from a Panel Study PONE-D-20-34729R3 Dear Dr. Srivastava, 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, Srinivas Goli, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Now, revisions are satisfactory and this paper can be accepted. Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251520.r007
Formally Accepted
30 Apr 2021 Acceptance Letter - Srinivas Goli, Editor PONE-D-20-34729R3 Does Lack of Parental Involvement Affect School Dropout among Indian Adolescents? Evidence from a Panel Study Dear Dr. Srivastava: 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 Dr. Srinivas Goli Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251520.r008

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .