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Dear Dr. Pan,
I am pleased to advise that the above paper has now been accepted for publication in PeerJ. Thank you for giving the Journal the opportunity to publish your work. We are impressed with your paper and believe that it will contribute well to the literature. Well done!
Best Regards,
Andree
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Jafri Abdullah, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
Dear Dr. Pan,
Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PeerJ. We have just obtained the reviews from our experts. I also have read the manuscript myself independently before looking at the reviews. Overall, we are satisfied with the revision and agree that your paper has potential for an impactful contribution.
One of the reviewers also raised a number of relatively minor concerns regarding the clarity of the writing and grammatical issues. I also noticed similar issues. Please address the comments and engage in a thorough proof-reading. Pending the revision, I am happy to conditionally accept your paper for publication in PeerJ.
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work, and we wish you all the best with your article.
Yours sincerely,
Andree Hartanto
Academic Editor
PeerJ
**Language Note:** The Academic Editor has identified that the English language must be improved. PeerJ can provide language editing services - please contact us at [email protected] for pricing (be sure to provide your manuscript number and title). Alternatively, you should make your own arrangements to improve the language quality and provide details in your response letter. – PeerJ Staff
I thank the author for taking into account the comments made in the previous review and I believe the paper has seen great improvement from the first submission. Nonetheless, there are still a few minor points to take note of moving forward.
I believe the paper still require further proof-reading as I have spotted grammatical faults in the edited sections. For instance, p. 3 lines 15 - 23, "present hedonistic perspective reflects as tendency..." instead of "present hedonistic perspective reflects a tendency..." amongst others. Another glaring error was in p. 5, lines 10-13, "After the participants completed the questionnaires, they were given a gift to express their gratitude"; this is extremely weird phrasing and requires a second look at.
No further edits required.
No further edits required.
Besides the minor issue in proof-reading, I am of the opinion that the authors have sufficiently addressed my concerns highlighted in the previous review.
See my comments.
See my comments.
See my comments.
Thanks for opportunity re-review manuscript entitled ''Self-control mediates the relationship between time perspective and mobile phone addiction in Chinese college students''. I have carefully reviewed the revised manuscript, and I am pleased to see that authors have addressed my previous comments in a thoughtful and comprehensive manner. The revised manuscript is now well-written, clear, and concise. The significance and novelty of work are well-established, and the results are presented in a clear and logical manner. I particularly appreciate the major and minor changes. Overall, I have no further comments or suggestions.
Dear Dr. Pan,
Thank you for the effort you have put forth in your manuscript titled: "Self-control mediates the relationship between time perspective and mobile phone addiction in Chinese college students." We appreciate your interest in PeerJ.
However, after careful review of the document, we regret to inform you that we cannot continue with the process of publication for this manuscript in PeerJ in its current form. This decision is based on extensive reviews received from two expert reviewers.
Reviewer 1 has noted your paper as generally interesting, but highlighted a number of issues including the need for proof-reading, proper use of statistical tools, and interpretation of results. They have suggested providing more theoretical justification to the various dimensions of time perspective, better clarity on reliability estimates, corrections on terminologies, proper justification of mechanisms discussed in the discussion section. They also requested further elaboration on certain results and clearer explanations of methodologies used.
In a similar vein, Reviewer 2 has flagged several essential corrections throughout the manuscript, which include amendments in terminology, restructuring of the methodology sections, inconsistencies in your statistical analyses and reporting, the lack of context-specific significance of your study in the introduction, and the need for providing practical implications of your findings.
Both reviewers have agreed that the manuscript needs more rigorous proofreading, more theoretical justification to support the overall narrative, corrections in terminologies, and in-depth explanations about the methodology and the analyses used.
Considering the extent of the concerns raised by the reviewers, it necessitates significant rewriting and additional research. We encourage you to refine the manuscript thoroughly and resubmit it for another fresh review. Please ensure that these comments are addressed in detail in your revised manuscript and rebuttal. Due to significant number of inconsistencies in the statistical reporting, we also require the analyses scripts to be made publicly available to ensure reproducibility. Please ensure that the analyses script to be made as clear as possible. You are welcome to submit a revision, if you think that you can address all concerns. Given this, I would like to stress that if you choose to submit a revised version, there is still a chance of rejection given the extensive modifications that are needed.
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work, and we wish you all the best with your article.
Yours sincerely,
Andree Hartanto, PhD
Academic Editor
PeerJ
A cross-sectional study surveyed 526 college students with the aim of investigating the association between time perspective and mobile phone addiction (MPA) through the mediating role of self-control. It was found that past negative, present fatalistic, and present hedonistic perspectives were positively associated with MPA, while future oriented perspective was negative associated with MPA. Through the mediation-by-measurement model, self-control appeared to mediate the association between time perspective and MPA.
In general, the objective of the current paper is interesting as it seeks to explain the influence of time perspective on MPA. Practically, the findings of this paper may inform educators and parental figures on possible ways to curb MPA through time perspective interventions.
However, it should be noted that the paper has various areas that are concerning and should be appropriately addressed before it is ready for release. Specifically, the paper still needs to improve on its basic reporting (i.e., remove irrelevant statements, check for grammatical errors, provide theoretical justification to claims, etc.), proper use of statistical tools, and interpretation of results. Below, I give detailed comments regarding these concerns.
1. The paper seems to suffer from a lack of proof-reading which leads to inconsistencies in term usage (e.g., smartphones and smart phones – choose one and use it consistently throughout), wrong usage of abbreviations (e.g., “APPs” should be applications), and grammatical errors. I believe the paper will strongly benefit in its reporting if it were to go through a more thorough and rigorous round of proof-reading.
2. While the introduction briefly introduced time perspective and provide some theoretical justification for the suspected mediating role of self-control, it lacked an elaboration on the different dimensions of time perspective and how each dimension may contribute to self-control. Ultimately, the paper chose to employ a measure of time perspective that was able to distinct the construct in five dimensions, as such, I believe it should be addressed in the introduction what each dimension is about and how each dimension is expected to influence self-control.
3. Regarding the reporting of reliability estimates for the measure on time perspective, I believe the authors should clarify in the manuscript specific Cronbach Alpha ratings rather than giving a range of estimates. A 0.55 value seems to indicate low reliability and requires justification on the continued use of the subscale throughout the analysis.
4. As structural equation modeling was already employed to test the mediation model, I think it would be beneficial that the authors could take the chance to add a measurement model to assess time perspective and its respective components/dimensions. A good fit of the measurement model to support the five dimensions view of time perspective would provide justification for keeping these perspectives distinct from one another.
5. In the results section, the authors suggested “full mediation” by self-control in the association between past negative, present hedonistic, present fatalistic perspectives and MPA. However, in the discussion section, when explaining the association between these time perspective dimensions and MPA, reasons other than self-control were provided in explaining these associations, such as coping via distraction by mobile phone usage. It seems counter intuitive that all these separate mechanisms were brought up in the discussion when in the results it was claimed that self-control fully mediates the association. I believe some reframing or rephrasing is in order for the narrative of the paper to flow more coherently and logically.
6. It was interestingly found that the direction of association between future oriented perspective and MPA was reversed after accounting for self-control as a mediator. However, this interesting result was not much discussed in the discussion section. The authors suggested that a suppression effect is taking place, and this seems worth exploring on what it really means and how it might have happened.
7. The authors stated that the method used in this study has its limitations and suggested measurement bias to be one of them. It would be best if the authors could clarify what type of measurement biases should be noted and why behavioral measures may address these limitations. Further, the term empirical sampling does not ring a bell to me, maybe the authors could also clarify what they meant by empirical sampling.
8. The authors suggested using longitudinal studies to address both the issue of establishing causality and understanding dynamism. I agree that longitudinal data will enable exploration of time dynamics but disagree that the longitudinal design is the answer to establishing causality. The longitudinal design is beneficial for establishing time precedence of one variable to another but is insufficient to conclude causality which will require experimental manipulation to achieve.
All in all, there are quite a number of concerns I have for this paper as detailed above and believe that the authors should be more careful and diligent in preparing this manuscript for publication.
See my comments.
See my comments.
See my comments.
Thanks for opportunity to review manuscript entitled ‘‘Self-control mediates the relationship between time perspective and mobile phone addiction in Chinese college students’’ for Peerj Journal. The author/authors examined influence of time perspective and trait self-control on MPA. The strength of the manuscript includes examining variables of interest in a country where such studies are scarce. Overall, although the logic behind article well, a lot of important problems exist in this article. I can summarize some of them below.
Necessary Corrections
1. Page 5, Line 15-20: In the following sentence, authors must use another word instead of epidemic, in this form it is very assertive ‘‘Mobile phone addiction (MPA) among college students is an epidemic problem and Chinese college students are a high-risk group for smartphone addiction.’’
2. Page 5, Line 20-27: In the following sentence ‘‘From this perspective, this study explores the influence of time perspective and trait self-control on MPA, in order to find effective measures to prevent and intervene MPA in college students.’’ Instead of find authors can use identify as a better verb.
3. Page 5, Line 31-32: In the following ‘‘mobile phone addiction’’ must be MPA.
4. Page 5, Line 32-33: In the following sentence ‘‘A structural equation model was used to examine the mediating role of self- control in the relationship between time perspective and MPA.’’ Structural equation modeling is unclear. Structural equation modeling include a lot of different analyses such as confirmatory factor analysis, latent growth curve modeling, latent variable mediation analyses. Authors must write specific analysis.
5. Page 5, Line 32-33: In the following sentence ‘‘Different dimensions of time perspective were strongly associated with MPA. Among them, past negative (r = 0.397, p < 0.01), present hedonistic (r = 0.207, p < 0.01) and present fatalistic (r = 0.444, p < 0.01) were positively associated with MPA, while future orientation (r =- 0.200, p < 0.01) was negatively associated with MPA.’’ All r representing Pearson correlation coefficient must be italic.
6. Page 6, Line 42-43: In the following sentence ‘‘This study confirms that future time perspective and self-control are protective factors for MPA, while past negative, present hedonistic and present fatalistic are risk factors for MPA.’’ This study confirms that is assertive instead of this sentences authors may be use Results of this study suggest that
7. Page 6, Line 45-46: Please revise following sentence especially valuable tool part. ‘‘It is a valuable method to prevent MPA by cultivating future time perspective and self- control of college students.’’
8. In the introduction section, authors must give information about importance of study in their cultural context.
9. Research hypotheses are wrong and must be corrected. using can is not appropriate.
10. Method section must construct research design participants, Measures, Prosedure, and Data analyses.
11. Research design section is completely missing.
12. procedure section is completely missing.
13. A lot of information in Participants section must move Procedures section.
14. Authors conducted a mediation analyses but did not give any information about it in data analyses section.
15. As seen in Figure 1, authors construct a mediation model with observed variable path analyses. However, in the findings both latent and observed variable path analyses conducted.
16. How authors valuated model fit is unclear in Data analyses section.
17. Authors did not construct a research hypotheses about present time perspective but added it to mediation analyses why?
18. Authors added mediation analyses bu latent and observed variables. However, how latent variables constructed is unclear. A lo of different method exist such as item parcelling. Which of them used is unclear.
19. In the results section all findings must repost as per APA 7 rules. Almost all of them completely wrongly reported.
20. Why authors used time perspective as observed variables in mediation analyses is unclear.
21. How goodness of fit to mediating model evaluated is unclear. What is good fit and excellent fit to evaluate model?
22. A lot of sentences in the manuscript need citations or not scientific to say and generally overgeneralization.
23. Practical implications are completely missing.
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