Protective and Educational Effects of Physical Activity Practice on Mental Health in Young Age during COVID-19 Lockdown
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Abstract
Sample of participants (university students) should be more precisely specified even in study aim (first para pf the Abstract)
Authors should briefly specify sub-facets of "life habits" in Variables (i.e. "life habits during COVID-19 restrictions (physical activity, xyxyxyyxy) etc"
Use term "students" or "participants" (but consistently) throughout the whole Abstract. Do not interchange different terms (i.e. students, participants, youngsters, etc)
Please avoid strict conclusions such as this one you have provided in Conclusion (suggestion: "There are certain evidences that physical activity was protective, ... - or similar)
INTRODUCTION
You have nicely stated that "Few studies were retrieved concerning the young adulthood, which revealed to be an age group at particular risk of developing mental health problems [12]." Provide a sentence of two explaining why is it so?
Generally, I would suggest authors to more properly "balance" the Introduction. As it is now, paragraphs are "disbalanced" in lengths, and more importantly - in information. Try to "sketch" the concept before finalizing the text.
Hypotheses are nicely presented, but I would personally prefer one main hypothesis. If you decide to stick to 3 hypotheses than use strict definition of the "positive" or "negative" association, such as these you have provided in 1st and 2nd one.
PARTICIPANTS
By all means, more details are needed about participants characteristics (where are they from?, how did you sample them?, did you calculate appropriate sample size?, etc.)
Please provide full questionnaire (or link) in supplementary materials
Provide references for Variables and Scales you have used
Divide statistics in phases and provide it point-by-point accordingly. AS it is now I had to read the Results to see what your have actually calculated.
RESULTS
Present Table 1 as figure - it would be more informative
Table 2 - calculate differences (t-test???) for Genders and Sport/PA practice
Combine Figures 2-5 in one graph. I strongly suggest you to use professional graph tools, and not statistical program (you have used Statistica, I suppose)
DISCUSSION
Organize the discussion according to your study hypotheses and discuss accordingly; not neccesarilly in separate subheadings (although I would personally prefer such approach)
CONCUSION
If I may, I will INSIST on including Conclusion section
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
thank you so much for providing insightful suggestions.
Please find attached a point by point answers to your comments.
Abstract
Sample of participants (university students) should be more precisely specified even in study aim (first para pf the Abstract)
We specified that we are referring to University students. Thank you!
Authors should briefly specify sub-facets of "life habits" in Variables (i.e. "life habits during COVID-19 restrictions (physical activity, xyxyxyyxy) etc"
Dear Reviewer, we specified life habits as you suggested, thank you!
Use term "students" or "participants" (but consistently) throughout the whole Abstract. Do not interchange different terms (i.e. students, participants, youngsters, etc)
We chose to use “students” and used the term consistently throughout the abstract.
Please avoid strict conclusions such as this one you have provided in Conclusion (suggestion: "There are certain evidences that physical activity was protective, ... - or similar)
We rephrased the conclusion keeping it potential and not strict. Thank you.
INTRODUCTION
You have nicely stated that "Few studies were retrieved concerning the young adulthood, which revealed to be an age group at particular risk of developing mental health problems [12]." Provide a sentence of two explaining why is it so?
Dear reviewer, we added some sentences to explain why young adults are at risk of developing mental health problems.
Generally, I would suggest authors to more properly "balance" the Introduction. As it is now, paragraphs are "disbalanced" in lengths, and more importantly - in information. Try to "sketch" the concept before finalizing the text.
Dear Reviewer, we tried to balance the introduction by rephrasing some parts and separating some concepts, to make more similar paragraphs.
Hypotheses are nicely presented, but I would personally prefer one main hypothesis. If you decide to stick to 3 hypotheses than use strict definition of the "positive" or "negative" association, such as these you have provided in 1st and 2nd one.
Dear Reviewer, we decided to stick to 3 hypotheses and to reformulate the latter stating the direction of the relationship (“positive”/”negative”). Thank you for your comments.
PARTICIPANTS
By all means, more details are needed about participants characteristics (where are they from?, how did you sample them?, did you calculate appropriate sample size?, etc.)
Dear Reviewer, we provided the information about sampling procedures and students’ provenience.
Please provide full questionnaire (or link) in supplementary materials
Dear Reviewer, you can find the full questionnaire in the supplementary materials section.
Provide references for Variables and Scales you have used
Dear Reviewer, the reference for the scales are already specified within the text.
Divide statistics in phases and provide it point-by-point accordingly. AS it is now I had to read the Results to see what your have actually calculated.
Dear reviewer, we divided the analyses and the results into subheadings. Thank you!
RESULTS
Present Table 1 as figure - it would be more informative
Dear Reviewer, we replaced Table 1 with Figure 1.
Table 2 - calculate differences (t-test???) for Genders and Sport/PA practice
Dear reviewer, we provided the differences for genders and PA practice by calculating t-test.
Combine Figures 2-5 in one graph. I strongly suggest you to use professional graph tools, and not statistical program (you have used Statistica, I suppose)
Dear Reviewer, we used a professional tool for creating figures (in principle we used R), except for the path analysis model.
DISCUSSION
Organize the discussion according to your study hypotheses and discuss accordingly; not neccesarilly in separate subheadings (although I would personally prefer such approach)
Dear Reviewer, we organized the discussion picking the hypotheses one by one. Thank you for the comment.
CONCUSION
If I may, I will INSIST on including Conclusion section
Conclusion section was also added. Thank you!
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript reports the results of a quasi-experimental study investigating the relationship between physical activity and gender (in interaction) over fear on the COVID-19, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), neuroticism, and self-efficacy. The study is methodologically sound and the manuscript is clear and sufficiently detailed. English language and style is also appropriate.
Nevertheless, I feel that some clarifications should be added to the text prior to publication.
Subjects are grouped based on the levels of the independent variable, rather than randomly assigned to the experimental conditions. For this reason, as the authors state in the conclusion of the manuscript, no direction of effect (or causal relationship) can be established. As a consequence, the authors need to be more cautious when they speak of a protective effect, as this implies directionality of the correlation. For example, in line 324 "while PA was protective for males, the same did not happen for sedentary females."
Did the questionnaire collect any information about individual physical activity levels "before" the pandemic? it is possible that some people increased or decreased activity levels during the lock-down, The effect of variation in physical activity could be modulatory on the absolute value of physical activity.
Does the data in your possession allow to verify whether the physical activity was team or individual? In the period of the second lock-down in Italy (if I am not mistaken) for agonistic activity it was also possible to do team training. Is it possible to check whether, for some reason, the type of activity performed was different between males and females?
Could you provide more methodological details on how the online survey was constructed, i.e., what software or libraries were used? Is it possible to share a link to the survey or code?
No exclusion criteria are mentioned. In online data collection, there are often participants who do not take the task seriously or who get fed up halfway through and drop out. Have any participants been excluded? If so, can you report the criteria?
I would suggest a table showing 1) number of people contacted 2) people who agreed to participate 3) people who completed 4) people discarded after completion, etc...
The figures seem to have low resolution. Moreover, I would suggest a plot that clearly shows the distribution of the raw data such as a violin plot or a box plot with individual datapoints superimposed to the boxes. Also figure 4 is missing the legend.
Although not explicitly required by the journal, it is good practice to share the dataset in an open access repository or as supplementary material (if possible).
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
thank you so much for providing your suggestions.
Please find attached a point by point answers to your comments.
The manuscript reports the results of a quasi-experimental study investigating the relationship between physical activity and gender (in interaction) over fear on the COVID-19, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), neuroticism, and self-efficacy. The study is methodologically sound and the manuscript is clear and sufficiently detailed. English language and style is also appropriate.
Nevertheless, I feel that some clarifications should be added to the text prior to publication.
Subjects are grouped based on the levels of the independent variable, rather than randomly assigned to the experimental conditions. For this reason, as the authors state in the conclusion of the manuscript, no direction of effect (or causal relationship) can be established. As a consequence, the authors need to be more cautious when they speak of a protective effect, as this implies directionality of the correlation. For example, in line 324 "while PA was protective for males, the same did not happen for sedentary females."
Dear Reviewer, thank you for your comment. We rephrased sentences to be more cautious in conclusions.
Did the questionnaire collect any information about individual physical activity levels "before" the pandemic? it is possible that some people increased or decreased activity levels during the lock-down, The effect of variation in physical activity could be modulatory on the absolute value of physical activity.
Unfortunately, we could not assess PA prior the pandemic, for this reason we put it as limitation.
Does the data in your possession allow to verify whether the physical activity was team or individual? In the period of the second lock-down in Italy (if I am not mistaken) for agonistic activity it was also possible to do team training. Is it possible to check whether, for some reason, the type of activity performed was different between males and females?
Dear reviewer, we did not collect the information about the type of sport practiced and we put it as limitation.
Could you provide more methodological details on how the online survey was constructed, i.e., what software or libraries were used? Is it possible to share a link to the survey or code?
We added some information about the software and libraries used and we provided the questionnaire in the supplementary material.
No exclusion criteria are mentioned. In online data collection, there are often participants who do not take the task seriously or who get fed up halfway through and drop out. Have any participants been excluded? If so, can you report the criteria?
We added this information within the text (around 25 people did not complete the questionnaire). Thank you!
I would suggest a table showing 1) number of people contacted 2) people who agreed to participate 3) people who completed 4) people discarded after completion, etc...
Dear Reviewer, we did not have such detailed information because the survey was spread through social networks, so we have only the information about people that we excluded because their questionnaire was not complete.
The figures seem to have low resolution. Moreover, I would suggest a plot that clearly shows the distribution of the raw data such as a violin plot or a box plot with individual datapoints superimposed to the boxes. Also figure 4 is missing the legend.
Dear Reviewer, the figures were completely made ex novo with high resolution and legend are now present for each figure. Concerning the raw data, we decided to not include distribution of raw data. To give an idea about the differences in scores between males and females, sedentary and active, we calculated the t scores (see table 2), while in figure 1 you can find the proportion of males and females practicing sports or being sedentary.
Although not explicitly required by the journal, it is good practice to share the dataset in an open access repository or as supplementary material (if possible).
Dear Reviewer, the Bioethical Committee of University of Palermo does not allow dataset sharing in open access repository, but it is available under formal request addressed to it.
Reviewer 3 Report
Thanks for the Editor for giving me this opportunity to review this article. The majority of my comments are directed at ways the manuscript can be improved, but before listing those, I want to express praise for several notable strengths of the research:
This theme has good theoretical and practical significance for the issue of COVID-19 pandemic-related mental health. The authors combed the relevant literature in detail and summed up the basic context of the research, making the basis for raising questions more sufficient. The scheme design was scientific and feasible, and the results were correct and reliable. The discussion was thorough and in-depth. The conclusion is novel. This research has the potential to add to the knowledge base and to lead to policy and practices that can improve the lives of pepole during COVID-19 pandemic situation. It has practicable real-world application.
The following points need to be further improved:
1) How is the sample size calculated?
2) What are the inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants?
3) The information on reliability and validity of scales (except for the General Self-Efficacy Scale) from the related reference should be supplemented.
4) Please supplement the legend of Figure 4.
5) Please use Notes to explain the meaning of stars in Table 3
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
thank you so much for your comments.
We provided point-by-point answers to your comments.
1) How is the sample size calculated?
The sample size for Path Analysis model and SEM usually is 10 participant per item. Since we have 31 items, the adequate sample size should be 310 participants. We managed to contact 305 participants, but we removed 29 responses due to the incomplete answers.
2) What are the inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants?
Dear Reviewer, we excluded incomplete questionnaires. We did not forecast any specific exclusion criterion.
3) The information on reliability and validity of scales (except for the General Self-Efficacy Scale) from the related reference should be supplemented.
Dear Reviewer, we provided some references for reliability of the scales.
4) Please supplement the legend of Figure 4.
Done.
5) Please use Notes to explain the meaning of stars in Table 3
Done.
Thank you!
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for following my comments. I have only one "technical" suggestion on this version of the paper - please include "notation" (*** for example) to note significant differences between columns in Figures.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
we added the significance within the figures.
Thank you!
