Late Adolescents’ Texting Experiences with Family: Mixed-Method Analysis for Understanding Themes and Sentiments
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I am very honoured to read such interesting article.
The topic is very important due to the fact that texting/discussing/engaging within family members is basic and significant resource for positive development and addiction/depression prevention.
The research was aimed to get knowledge and understand what late adolescents (college students) text their families about (i.e., themes), and how they feel about their family texting experiences (i.e., sentiments).
The Methods used were adequate: semi-structured interviews from 19 college students (age 14 18-22 years, 13 female, 6 male), with 357 sentences/passages coded.
Results are very interesting based on mixed -method approach (qualitative and quantitative). Inductive content analysis revealed four themes: emotional support, relationship maintenance, conflict, and difficult conversations. There are examples of the adolescents' four main texting themes given however it would be more appropriete to give more detailed themes and subthemes characteristics. If I understand properly, there were 357 sentences/passages coded so it might be possible to be more specific: what kind of emotional support did adolescents mention? The reasons of the support (regardless the car)? What are the differences in texting to mother and father? What are the differences in texting to family based on the place of living (5 students were living on campus vs 14 were living at home?).
Conclusions are adequate to the given results. However might be widened if results will be presented in more detailed way.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We appreciate your positive comments on the strengths and contributions of this study, and your feedback for improving the manuscript.
We revised the qualitative analysis in Section 3.1.1 to clarify the types and reasons of emotional support by including more details for the quotes.
We analyzed the differences in texting to mother and father in both the qualitative and the quantitative analysis. To clarify this, specifically for qualitative analysis, we revised the beginning of Section 3.1 to highlight that Section 3.1 describes themes with family members in general, whereas the next section (Section 3.2) addressed the differences between mother and father regarding each theme.
The comparison between students who were living on campus and who were living at home was not an intent in the process of data collection, analysis, and coding. As a result, the sample size was limited and we did not reach theoretical saturation within those groups, thus we were unable to systematically analyze the data by these subgroups. Accordingly, we revised the Limitations and Future Directions (Section 4.1) to highlight that analyzing differences across these student subgroups is an important future direction with a larger sample.
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors and Editor
Congratulations on your research. It is very innovative and relevant. I am going to make a number of comments to help you improve your publication.
I found the introduction very interesting but it is perhaps too methodological. I understand that you come from the world of communication and it is great because the area of psychology is enriched. Even so I have missed that they address some issues such as post-modern society, the liquid society in terms of Bauman, the functionality of social networks in adolescents, and generational changes. There is an article "Analizing Teens an Analysis from the Perspective of Gamers in Youtube" that can help them to give a more psychological and educational vision. I also miss a more detailed description of sentiment analysis in the introduction, and the importance of positive polarity in the new generations especially the Z generation. I have a doubt regarding the methodology of the qualitative part when you say you divide the interviews into themes, have you performed a kappa analysis between observers? How do you deal with possible bias? Please elaborate on this part. I am also surprised that you put sofwatre envivo in the quantitative section when it is the most famous qualitative software. Please explain these issues.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We appreciate your positive comments on the strengths and contributions of this study, and your feedback for improving the manuscript.
Thank you for directing us to the article, "Analizing Teens an Analysis from the Perspective of Gamers in Youtube." Although YouTube and texting are two different channels, and interactions between gamers are likely very different from interactions with family members – the focus of this study, we found this article to be especially relevant when we are discussing the sentiment analysis results. Thus, we revised the Discussion section to incorporate the citation of this article and discuss the inconsistency between the sentiment analysis results in our paper and the results from the cited paper.
We did calculate inter-coder reliability for the qualitative coding. We revised Section 2.2 to clarify this.
Additional text on page 5 Section 2.2 has been added to provide clarity related to the qualitative methods and how potential biases were addressed between researchers.
For your question about software for our analysis: We used NVivo for our qualitative analysis but Python for quantitative analysis. We now revised Section 2.3 to clarify this.
