All reviews of published articles are made public. This includes manuscript files, peer review comments, author rebuttals and revised materials. Note: This was optional for articles submitted before 13 February 2023.
Peer reviewers are encouraged (but not required) to provide their names to the authors when submitting their peer review. If they agree to provide their name, then their personal profile page will reflect a public acknowledgment that they performed a review (even if the article is rejected). If the article is accepted, then reviewers who provided their name will be associated with the article itself.
I have thoroughly reviewed the revised version of your manuscript and thank you for having addressed all of the comments and concerns raised by the reviewers.
I have personally taken on the responsibility of assessing the revisions made to the manuscript. After my evaluation, I am pleased to report that I am satisfied with the current version presented.
I believe this manuscript is ready for publication.
Best regards
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Jafri Abdullah, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
No further comments
No further comments
No further comments
No further comments
Nothing to add.
Nothing to add.
Nothing to add.
Nothing to add.
Dear authors,
Thank you very much for the opportunity to work on your manuscript. We have received three reviews, and all of the reviewers expressed concerns, especially regarding the experimental design, which they suggest has weaknesses that compromise the data and, consequently, its interpretation. Therefore, I request that you take these criticisms into consideration when returning a revised version.
Best regards,
[# PeerJ Staff Note: Please ensure that all review and editorial comments are addressed in a response letter and any edits or clarifications mentioned in the letter are also inserted into the revised manuscript where appropriate. #]
This paper explores employs a very large sample of adults in Perú to report on perceptions of family dynamics. Two different samples were tested before the pandemic in 2019 and during the second half of 2020. The manuscript is interesting and well written, with sufficient context.
I commend the authors on conducting this important work during a particularly challenging period of lock down, and for doing so with a very large and diverse sample in Perú specifically and Latin America more broadly, as these two regions are typically underrepresented in research.
I also commend the authors on sharing their data in figshare and sharing STATA syntax.
Raw data was shared as .dta. Can the authors please share as .csv to be open to all statistical programs.
Causal language is used or implied, when many of the results are derived from cross-sectional analyses. Please revise accordingly.
Major issues
1. The biggest limitation for me is how to disentangle potential pandemic effects from just drastic variability in respondents in the 2019 and 2020 samples. I am unsure of how the demographics of the person reporting relate to the family composition. I am struck (but not surprised) by the fact that in 2019, 30% of the respondents are single vs 76% in 2020.
1.a. From reading further information in the Appendix I understand that the 2020 survey is asking undergrad students, emerging adults, to report on their family dynamics, which is quite different from having head of household (mothers, fathers, who are adults) do the reporting. Could the authors please address this as an important confound (vs pandemic effects). in the Discussion/Limitations.
1.b. I understand that the capacity of respondents with the most caregiving duties during the pandemic was the most affected. Are you mostly getting answers from people without children or other caregiver responsibilities. Would this affect their appraisal of family dynamics?
1.c. Are you biased to only get answers from families who are less over-burdened than others and are therefore picking up on families that have inherently less chaotic dynamics?
2. Be careful with causal language. Despite its many strengths, the article is limited to a comparison of two different samples for Hypothesis 1, and cross-sectional analyses for Hypothesis 2. Neither can provide a strong test of causality. I would recommend exploring potential explanations and toning down causal language throughout the Introduction and Discussion.
For example, authors mention that “While Peruvian families moved from disengaged or chaotic levels to more balanced cohesion and flexibility levels, enmeshed and rigid families stayed as they were”. I do not think such as conclusive statement can be made from comparing two different cross-sectional samples, and without a profile analyses.
Similarly, authors conclude that “During the pandemic, balanced families had more capacity to comply with quarantine than unbalanced families”. Given that these conclusions are derived from cross-sectional analyses, I would encourage authors to tone down the causal language. Could other third variables, such as income, be explaining both family function and compliance?
Minor issues
1. The 2020 has wide regional diversity which is a strength of the study. Are there notable regional differences in terms of strength of external endorsement of quarantine measures? It is my understanding that there were some towns and cities where there were even military patrols enforcing certain lockdown measures.
2. A key covariate that is missing is family size. Do the authors have more information on the number of members of the family and the composition?
3. Would a sensitivity analysis comparing participants in the Ancash regions be useful and a better match between 2019 and 2020 samples?
4. Could the authors please share data in .csv instead of .dta. I do not use STATA so I could not open the dataset.
5. This paper might be of interest.
Guazzelli Williamson, V., Berger, E.L., Barendse, M.E. et al. Socio-ecological Resilience Relates to Lower Internalizing Symptoms among Adolescents during the Strictest Period of COVID-19 Lockdown in Perú. Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol 50, 1429–1444 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-022-00928-y
Thank you for the submission of manuscript titled:
Differences on family functioning before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: an observational study in Peruvian families. Here are my comments:
1. What is the problem of this? … families to live together 24 hours a day, is it a good way to strengthen family bonding?
2. I think it is still incomplete: reduced contact with extended family and friends, while it is usually done also by telecommunication approach
3. Change less sleep to lack of sleep or sleep deprivation
4. Too much talk about hypothesis
5. No specific objective mentioned, it is concealed within the hypothesis
6. What is this? I do not understand: “Being Peru a descriptive example of how the pandemic affected most Latin American LMIC”
7. Discuss more about why Peru? Why family (smallest component of the community)?
8. Discuss more about the process of problem within the family during COVID-19 and its realistic example
There are several issues in this section
1. two independent -but similar- groups must be described, especially about sample gathering
2. I don’t understand from where did the 2019 data came from? It seriously flawed the current study process
3. Move family and context description to intro, it is too much about literature review
4. No number of ethical approval?
5. Non-random sample please describe, I think it would be better to do multistage/stratified sampling actually
6. Validation of data collection instrument?
1. I am not sure that adding mean and standard deviation is a correct way to determine cut-off
2. I think the discussion format is unusual, by breaking it into parts
1. The writing must be improved, in current form it is difficult to follow. Consultation with professional proofreading service or people with extensive scientific research experience and great command in English is highly suggested. Example: more smoking and alcohol consumption increased …., less sleep (check in basic reporting), faciliatet (line 357)
2. Figure 1 Don’t know your family income? Overall figure 1 used wrong term.
1.1 Major suggestions
1.1.1 There is no background presented for satisfaction. How is satisfaction theoretically related to the other constructs used to build hypothesis 2?
1.1.2 I find it quite counterintuitive to read the expression "'more cohesion and less flexibility" in line 369, since both constructs (cohesion and flexibility) were measured through variables that either the higher the score the better, or the higher the score the worse in terms of family functioning. How "less flexibility" was a pattern when the concept is "the ability to adjust its structure in case to overcome evolutionary difficulties (flexibility)" (lines 135-136) and the results show "Families assessed during the pandemic (...)" (lines 339-341)?
1.2 Minor suggestions
1.2.1 In the abstract, authors are using COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-19 epidemic(s), COVID-19 and COVID as synonyms. Should these terms be standardized? Lines 97, 98, 100, 103, 110, and 113. In the line 113, instead of "in the context of epidemics" should it be "in the context of social confinement"? No subheadings were presented.
1.2.2 Keywords should represent controlled terms, such as DeCS or MeSH indexes. I suggest remove lockdown (colloquial) as it is synonyms for quarantine (formal). Also, I suggest substitute "family functioning, family cohesion, family flexibility, family communication, family satisfaction" (non-standardized ones ate lines 115-116) for Family Relations, Family Structure, Family Characteristics, Family Conflict, Psychosocial Functioning, Social Cohesion, Communication, Interpersonal Relations and/or Personal Satisfaction (source: https://decs.bvsalud.org/en/).
1.2.3 Item 1 of Minor suggestions should be addressed in the manuscript as a whole.
1.2.4 In the line 126, should they be " home-schooling" and "long-term"?
1.2.5 How many cities, in the line 183? Might be the case of an inclusion of a brief national representative description, if there is any space left considering the manuscript word counting. For instance, "X cities from Y regions of Peru".
1.2.6 In the line 228, instead of "designed by David Olson", should it be "designed by Olson (2011)"?
1.2.7 In the line 317, the standard adopted in science is a significance level of 5%. Why did the authors decide to use 1%? Does this mean that some relationships at a significance level between 1% and 5% were not considered in the results and discussion?
1.2.8 In the line 342, since this is not a longitudinal study, should not it be "differences" rather than "changes"?
1.2.9 In the line 357, "facilitate" is misspelled.
2.1 My only observation is that the study did not present a minimum sample size calculation for the proposed hypotheses.
3.1 Major suggestions
3.1.1 One of my major concerns is that the authors state they have "two independent - but similar - groups" (lines 102-13 and 174), but table 1 does not show a much similarity. I understand that the variables used to characterize the sample were used as control variables, but this is not enough to characterize similarity between groups. For the variable "with children", for example, the proportion is inverse between the categories of the groups before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
3.1.2 I am not sure what the authors' rationale was for using univariate analysis (from line 294 on) when circumplex model theory predicts the interaction between cohesion and flexibility (lines 134-136) in order to understand family functioning. Would not be possible to apply multivariate models to test the interaction between these constructs, especially with a large sample like the one presented here?
No additional comments.
All text and materials provided via this peer-review history page are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.