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Dear Authors, I am happy with the current version and consider the manuscript ready for publication. Congratulations!
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Mike Climstein, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
Dear Authors, Thank you for considerably improving your manuscript. Please address a few comments from the reviewers that were not fully answered.
I applaud the authors for their thorough and timely revisions to the two prior reviews. Their additions/revisions have tightened up the paper, using clear, concise and professional language; the references support the rationale for the study as well as corroborate the study findings. The structure and results are complete and accurately reflect the findings.
Absolutely yes to all of the criteria:
Yes: Original primary research within Aims and Scope of the journal.
Yes: Research question well defined, relevant & meaningful. It is stated how research fills an identified knowledge gap.
Yes: Rigorous investigation performed to a high technical & ethical standard.
Yes: Methods described with sufficient detail & information to replicate--particularly with the revisions, the methods set the course for future studies in other states in Austria and other countries, with additional key informants (teachers, students, parents).
Yes to all criteria:
Meaningful replication encouraged where rationale & benefit to literature is clearly stated.
All underlying data have been provided; they are robust, statistically sound, & controlled.
Conclusions are well stated, linked to original research question & limited to supporting results. (see the comment above about the methods for replication.)
I have attached a track change document with VERY MINOR, not substantive, suggestions for grammar and clarity. Mysuggestions should appear in blue, and in the review window or as comments.
L50 WHO was mentioned in full for the first time and its acronym was used later. However, the acronym was not put in bracket when the full name was firstly mentioned.
L57 What is HBSC? State it in full when firstly mentioned.
I cannot find revised texts that clarify “policy”
N/A
The question whether there are requirements for Austrian schools to have a minimum number of school facilities supporting physical activity/exercise/sport has not yet responded. This point is important to judge whether the school PA facilities of 4.2+ -2 can be addressed as “well equipped”. If the Austrian government (Ministry of Education) has a list of requirements that schools must have 1 2 3 4 5 in school vicinity. Then the schools with number of PA facilities at 4.2 would be called friendly but they are under the standard and so they are not well equipped.
L277 The expression might be too bold, unless authors are really sure about it. It will be better to add the word “in Austria” at the end of this sentence. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first assessment of schools’ activity friendliness….
I commend you on your work. The paper has improved considerably. However, there are still some issues that need to be addressed before publication:
- Please make sure that you use activity friendliness instead of PA friendliness consistently throughout the text (see e.g. line 36).
- Avoid normative statements without justification. For example, why should PA provision and fitness testing be expanded (line 39)?
- Lines 50-51: The WHO recommendations you quote are out of date. Please refer to the new ones.
- Line 65: Demetriou et al, 2019 is a protocol for a systematic review. It does not provide evidence.
- Please check the language throughout the document. There are still many errors and typos, e.g. in line 66 "potential TO support".
- Line 350: The "census sampling method" as you describe it does not allow for generalisations. Please discuss the limitations of this approach. I suggest deleting the sentence: “However, despite the likely higher true response rate, representativeness of the entire Carinthia principal population cannot be safely assumed”. Only a sample can be considered representative or generalisable. You should compare at least some indicators of the sample with the whole population of schools (frequency distributions of school types, school sizes, regional distribution, etc.) to show the extent to which some indicators of your sample resemble the whole population of schools.
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Your manuscript has been reviewed by three reviewers. Please address all suggested changes, and feel free to resubmit once revisions are complete. Thank you!
**PeerJ Staff Note:** Please ensure that all review and editorial comments are addressed in a response letter and that any edits or clarifications mentioned in the letter are also inserted into the revised manuscript where appropriate.
**Language Note:** The review process 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
Clear and unambiguous, professional English used throughout.
I have made some editorial/grammatical suggestions, to improve clarity.
Literature references, sufficient field background/context provided.
The authors established the need for their survey. Some references cited will need to be revised to match APA style, particularly when referencing multiple works at one time. For example, in the Introduction, line 51: “…performance (Singh et al., 2019) (Poitras et al., 2016) (Janssen & Leblanc, 2010). …” These references should be collected into one parenthetical phrase.
Professional article structure, figures, tables. Raw data shared.
The article is professional in its structure, and the use of tables is appropriate.
Figures should be relevant to the content of the article, of sufficient resolution, and appropriately described and labeled.
NA
All appropriate raw data have been made available in accordance with our Data Sharing policy.
The authors state there were a total of 130 principals responding…but in the raw data table, the ID numbers go up to 166. What happened to the other 36 respondents’ data? If the data were incomplete and thus the respondent removed from analyses, the authors need to state this. Importantly, for the strength of the study, the response rate would improve, but with 36 responses not complete, the authors’ comments about whether the data is representative (in the Limitations section) would be further emphasized.
See my comment under Validity about other data and its presentation in the manuscript
Research question well defined, relevant & meaningful. It is stated how research fills an identified knowledge gap.
The submission did clearly define the research question, and was relevant and meaningful
Rigorous investigation performed to a high technical & ethical standard.
The authors secured ethical approval, and stated participants completed informed consent to complete the survey.
Methods described with sufficient detail & information to replicate.
I have some questions listed in the detailed line-by-line review attached.
I also have a couple questions about the CSPER instrument. The authors descried the “questionnaire was generated using an expert consensus process involving both scientists and school personnel. The final instrument comprised a combination of single- and multiple-choice questions relating to the movement friendliness of schools.” However, how was this instrument validated; was it adapted from a previously validated instrument? Would the authors make this instrument available for others?
All underlying data have been provided; they are robust, statistically sound, & controlled.
The data was available. Please revise Table 1. The manuscript discusses swimming halls but Table 1 does not include them.
Also, the total sample n in Table 1 is listed as 127. Please explain how this is possible if the total n of principals is 130.
Finally, in Table 1, the last row is “Gym” with a total n of 9! That is inconsistent with the statements in the abstract, the manuscript and in the raw data. The raw data shows 2 columns related to gymnastics halls: Column I and Column J. When I summed the columns, the totals were 158 and 207 respectively.
Conclusions are well stated, linked to original research question & limited to supporting results.
The conclusions were appropriately stated, and connected to the original question investigated. They were limited to those supported by the results. See my comments in the manuscript about suggested writing/sentence structure revisions.
Suggested edits/revisions for clarity.
ABSTRACT:
Line 26: The methods section says the surveys were mailed in early 2023.
Lines 27-31. Include the number (n) and percentages in the description. Confirm these numbers based on the raw data first (see comments in the Validity of Findings section) SUGGESTED presentation, to be consistent with RESULTS section:
A total of n=130 principals answered the survey, a response rate of 38%. While most schools ( ___%, n=111) had a gym, only one third (37%, n=___) had access to a swimming hall. On average, the schools had 4.2 ± 2 PA facilities with significant variation between school types (e.g., high schools: 5±2 vs. primary schools: 3.5 ±2). The most common facilities were meadow areas (89%, n=___), sports fields (71.7%, n=___), and playgrounds (64.6%, n=___). Almost half of the schools….
Line 37: should read: …additional sports offerings…
INTRODUCTION:
Lines 52-53: Revise … recommends a minimum of 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous PA per day to maintain or improve health in children and adolescents.
Line 57: eliminate “the” from “majority of adolescents...”
Lines 62-64: Revise and replace “They”: Hence, primary schools should also be considered when implementing activity-based health promotion strategies (Carrasco-Uribarren et al., 2023) (Masini et al., 2020).
Line 69: insert “with”: … available outdoor facilities such as soccer fields or playgrounds to be associated with motor skill…
Line 76: replace “another” with “an” since the sentence begins “In addition…” In addition to the availability of PA facilities, school policy appears to represent an essential…
Lines 80-82: revise: Other suggested policy measures for schools to increase PA include involvement in projects such as active school or active commuting (Messing et al., 2019; Norris et al., 2020).
Line 84: eliminate the space after the dash of movement-friendly
Lines 86-90: suggestion to tighten and clarify:
Particularly, the translation of knowledge about the value of PA facilities into practice is largely unknown as no study has evaluated the PA-friendliness of multiple schools on a large scale. Our investigation aimed to analyze the availability and accessibility of PA facilities (e.g., sports courts, swimming pools, athletic tracks) and the PA policy of all the schools in one state in Austria.
MATERIALS & METHODS
Line 99: insert “the”: …was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Council of the University of…
Lines 107-108: confirm dates and match/update Abstract
Line 111: eliminate comma at the end of the line
Line 123: eliminate space after dash in Likert-scaled
Line 136: Is Jamovi a brand? Does it need a year or edition reference?
RESULTS
Lines 142: to be consistent with the ABSTRACT, eliminate “n=” before 130.
Line 147: eliminate space in 1294; either insert a comma, e.g.: 1,294 or no space at all
Line 151: replace comma with decimal: 87.4%
Line 167: Say more about these relationships. In what way did your see the relationships? HS v Primary? Urban v rural? Other ways type and PA facilities were related?
Lines 172-178: Suggested revision for clarity:
With regard to the PE teachers’ educational level, three quarters of the schools reported appointment of qualified teachers only, while almost one quarter had classes taught by both qualified and non-qualified (no academic degree in PE) personnel (table 2). Middle schools demonstrated the lowest percentages of PE classes with qualified PE teachers (____%). High schools had the highest percentages of PE classes with qualified PE teachers (____%). In most schools, PE classes were cancelled less than 20% of the time.what does this mean? To cancel PE? More than four in five schools had at least 80% of students participating in PE classes I assumed you were asking about the percentage of students participating in classes in general as might be measured by schedules or enrollment in classes—or did you mean participating in a physically active way during the class period? Vocational high schools showed the lowest participation (___%).
Line 182: replace “physical activity” with PA (to be consistent)
Lines 192-193: revise for accuracy: …promotion at their school. More than 80% of the principals agreed their schools were movement friendly Your survey did not address whether they were convinced about it. (table 3). Eliminate the paragraph space at the end of this sentence.
Lines 194-196: Say more about these relationships. In what way did your see the relationships? Higher PA facilities = more offerings? fewer? Smilarly, participation is higher or lower with more or less facilities?
Line 195: replace “offers” with “offerings”: …non-curricular PA offerings…
DISCUSSION
Line 200: suggested edit: Schools, if designed to be movement-friendly, represent pivotal elements of PA promotion for youth.
Line 203: eliminate “inter alia” it is not at all a common term.
Line 211: eliminate “global”—it could be misinterpreted that this survey was a world-wide survey or that this is the first survey in the world of its kind. Both seem to be exaggerations, and the use of the word “global” is just not necessary.
Line 218: replace “does” with “do”
Line 222: remove “about” and replace “lots” with “many” (“lots” is too colloquial/casual)
Lines 223-225: With regard to the specific number, Haug et al. (2010) found out that four of eight infrastructural characteristics were significant predictors for daily PA. Explain this sentence better—what are the four? What does it mean when you say 4 of 8 are significant predictors?
Line 231-232: say more about this correlation in the results section, so that in the discussion, you can reinforce it.
Line 236: eliminate “’best possibly”
Line 243-245: revise: Improving the amount, variety and condition of activity facilities in primary schools is a highly relevant strategy to increase PA levels throughout the school career.
Line 248-252: revise: These findings align with a previous study (Morton, Corder, et al., 2016) which showed a more positively perceived physical environment, and a greater amount of extracurricular physical activity offerings in high schools than in primary schools. In addition, the high schools in our study also had PE teachers with the highest educational level. …
Line 259: spell out “minutes” and revise: “…reduction of about 40 fewer minutes of breaktime was seen, and in secondary schools, the decrease amounted more than one hour. The morning break duration of 15-20 minutes in both primary and secondary schools is consistent with our findings….”
Line 263: replace “a revision” with “an increase”
Lines 266-274: rework this paragraph. An option:
Our study has a variety of practical implications, underscoring the need for appropriate infrastructure for schools to act as a place for sustainable health education. Our study showed that the provision of PA infrastructure may depend on the type of school, and while the number of facilities is generally high, primary and middle school display lower counts. Seeking to increase facilities in primary and middle schools could more effectively support children’s and public health. However, merely providing infrastructure may not be sufficient to fully exploit the potential of PA promotion in schools. We recommend the involvement of schools in PA projects and initiatives which aim to provide children with sufficient time to engage in PA (e.g., longer break durations and/or extracurricular PE lessons).
Line 278: replace “principles” with “principals”
Line 279-282: revise:
The calculated response rate of 38% is satisfactory; however, representativeness of the entire Carinthia principal population cannot be safely assumed. Nor can this sample be suggested to represent principals in other states in Austria or in other countries.
Note: Please verify the response rate considering my comments in the Basic Reporting section. Also, this line was a supposition without basis—unless you sent the emails with read receipt and know principals didn’t open them? If that’s the case, mention this in the Methods section. particularly when considering that the actual response rate is likely to be higher due to the fact that not all principals may have received and read the email invitation.
Line 283: When you say “their views may be biased,” I assumed you were referring to PE teachers. Consider revising these last sentences for clarity—this is only suggestion:
We decided to approach school principals as the leaders who would have the most “whole school” perspective. PE teachers may have more granular-level knowledge about what happens in their classes and elsewhere with PA which may have skewed their responses about the school facilities and policies (positively or negatively). We also acknowledge that in some cases, principals may not have had sufficient insight into the micro-level PA promotion (e.g. in the PE classes). Therefore, future studies may conduct similar surveys with other stakeholders such as teachers, students, and parents.
Tables
As indicated above, the total sample in each of the tables doesn’t match the response n of 130. Please explain how/why the total sample would be different for each table in the methods section above.
Table 1: Swimming is missing altogether, and the gym data is inaccurate.
Table 2: suggest using the word “policy” versus “political” as they are not the same.
Table 3: remove the “r” next to the % sign. The other two tables do not have this.
Overall comments
Research that can provide insightful information about school physical activity policy and implementation is scarce. Although the ideas and intention in developing this paper are great, the writing of this paper is pretty loose, and contextual data which could provide a good background to the paper are missing. This makes it quite difficult for readers to follow and believe in the presented results.
Many results were wrongly interpreted and overclaimed. Descriptive statistics can only provide basic observational information and summarize data. Descriptive statistics cannot identify any association between variables.
English and grammar should be reviewed for improvement.
See additional comments.
See additional comments.
Specific comment
Abstract
Authors mentioned in line 3 that “the translation of these findings into practice has not been examined on at the population level”. Readers then expect that this paper would investigate the translation or implementation of the policy, but it turned out to be a different story when reading the next sentence. The word “movement friendliness” brings quite a lot of questions.
The word “Carinthian” might not be necessary in the abstract. It can be introduced in the introduction section.
Introduction
L53 make the sentence tighter, please be specific with the recommendations. WHO recommends that children aged 5-17 yo to have a min of 60 min MVPA on average daily.
It would be much nicer if authors could provide a contextual background regarding school system in Austrian and national or regional educational policy including those related to PA promotion.
There is no evidence on physical activity levels among Austrian students. More specifically on PA participation inside school hours. It would help emphasize the importance of this study and understanding around the topic. For instance, international readers would be curious to know whether there’re regulations for Austrian schools to provide a standard set of PA/sport/exercise facilities within school. In some countries, the ministry of education set out a minimum requirement for a provision of those facilities. This information is important to justify the results and conclusions of this paper.
Definition of the “policy” and “movement-friendly school” in this study should be introduced early and clearly.
Instrument
CSPER is the main instrument used in this study but there’s no details concerning development of the questionnaire and its psychometric properties (validity and reliability).
Statistics
Be speicif of what stat software was used.
Results
Presentation of the results could be in graphical format.
L165 and 194 there’re no tables presenting results of the correlation analyses.
Discussion
First paragraph of this section is not necessary as it seems like another introduction. Why not direct to the point.
L215-218 Since there’s no contextual background and no range of the number of the PA facilities is presented. With the mean number of facilities of 4.2, evidence did not sufficiently indicate that most schools are well-equipped. With this number, it could be low or high in a specific context, and hard to proof that this level is satisfactory. L227 has the same problem.
L222 & 225 the sentence is loose. Be specific, PA levels of whom. Do not omit and assume that readers would understand the whole story.
L243-245 Since this study did not examine an association between school physical activity facility and students’ physical activity levels. Suggesting that improvement in the amount, variety and condition of activity facilities in school is a highly relevant strategy to increase physical activity levels overclaimed the results and was a wrong interpretation.
L262-264 the suggestion has the same overclaim problem. This study observed shorter breaks in high schools. Authors could not imply that students from school with shorter breaks had low levels of PA.
Limitations
L279 need a ref when stating that a response rate of 38% is satifactory.
The paper deals with an interesting subject. However, in my opinion there are some major flaws, which will be discussed below.
1. The introduction is rather short. In order to provide an overview of relevant findings, the state of research should be discussed in more detail:
- 2nd paragraph (p. 55 ff.): Some figures / results from Austria would be helpful here. Global data cannot easily be used to describe a national situation. Due to the cultural proximity, results from Germany (see e.g. Rittsteiger et al., 2021, Schmidt et al., 2020) could be used. In addition, more details on PA in different settings and the influence of social inequality on PA behaviour would be helpful to outline the state of research.
- 3rd paragraph (p. 66 ff.): A more detailed discussion of the state of research on different levels of physical activity in children and adolescents in different settings is needed to assess the relevance and knowledge of the school setting. See, for example, the review by Kelso et al. (2021).
- 4th paragraph (p. 76 ff.): There is a large body of work on active commuting to school. I'd suggest discussing the main findings (see e.g. a recent review by Klos et al, 2023).
2. There does not seem to be a theoretical background. There are many theoretical approaches from public health that explain how structural conditions (Verhältnisse) influence PA behavior (Verhalten). There are also various sociological theories that explain how (social) space is produced and influences human behaviour. I'd suggest that you ground your study theoretically.
3. The aim of the study seems to be purely descriptive. While this can be useful, the question arises as to what we can learn from the results beyond the knowledge of the infrastructure. Please discuss the results in the light of the state of research and the usefulness of your results for practice and theory.
4. Materials and methods:
- Please include the questionnaire used.
- Please clearly state which software was used.
5. Results:
- Please discuss the extent to which your sample is or is not suitable for drawing general conclusions ("representativeness"). The short explanation in the limitations section is not sufficient. Consider aspects such as a random sample and a comparison between the realised sample and the total sample.
- Tables 1, 2 & 3: Please calculate statistical differences and present them in the tables. Also, discuss any statistical differences in the discussion section.
- Table 3: What does the 'r' after '%' stand for?
- Please introduce any abbreviations first (e.g. "IQR").
- Please discuss the validity of your results when asking the principals. I suspect that the responses (e.g. on movement friendliness) are biased.
- Correlations appear to be negative - please explain.
6. Conclusions: One question remains: So what? I think you need to provide more theoretical input, a more comprehensive review of the state of research, more in-depth statistical analysis and a deeper discussion of your study to make this a publishable paper.
References
Kelso, A.; Reimers, A.K; Abu-Omar, K.; Wunsch, K.; Niessner, C.; Wäsche, H.; Demetriou, Y. Locations of Physical Activity: Where Are Children, Adolescents, and Adults Physically ctive? A Systematic Review. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18, 1240. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18031240
Leon Klos, Tanja Eberhardt, Carina Nigg, Claudia Niessner, Hagen Wäsche, Alexander Woll, Perceived physical environment and active transport in adolescents: A systematic review, Journal of Transport & Health, Volume 33, 2023, 101689. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2023.101689.
Schmidt SCE, Anedda B, Burchartz A, Oriwol D, Kolb S, Wäsche H, et al. (2020) The physical activity of children and adolescents in Germany 2003-2017: The MoMo-study. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0236117. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236117
Rittsteiger, L., Hinz, T., Oriwol, D. et al. Sports participation of children and adolescents in Germany: disentangling the influence of parental socioeconomic status. BMC Public Health 21, 1446 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-11284-9
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