Author s response to reviews Title: The involvement of young people in school- and community-based noncommunicable disease prevention interventions: a scoping review of designs and outcomes Authors: Didier Jourdan (Didier.JOURDAN@univ-bpclermont.fr) Julie Christensen (jlhc@steno.dk) Emily Darlington (emily.darlington@univ-bpclermont.fr) Ane Bonde (ahbo@steno.dk) Paul Bloch (pabc@steno.dk) Bjarne Jensen (bjbj@steno.dk) Peter Bentsen (pebt@steno.dk) Version: 2 Date: 14 Sep 2016 Author s response to reviews: PUBH-D-16-01850: The involvement of young people in the development of school- and community-based prevention interventions: a scoping review of designs and outcomes. Dear Editor, We are pleased to send BMC PH our revised manuscript with its new title: The involvement of young people in the development of school- and community-based prevention interventions: a scoping review of designs and outcomes (Manuscript PUBH-D-16-01850). We are pleased and honoured that the reviewers liked the revised manuscript and our revisions, that we had done a great job of addressing the comments and I think this has improved the paper. I really like the table, and the presentation of the 'outcomes' has really improved the clarity of the paper. I think the paper is now ready for publication (Reviewer #1), and that the
paper, subject to a number of minor revisions, could be suitable for publication and make a welcomed contribution to the field of stakeholder involvement in school-community interventions targeting diet and physical activity (Reviewer #2). We have now revised the paper based on your suggestions and the constructive responses from Reviewers 1 and 2. The various comments have been considered carefully. Detailed responses to the individual reviewer concerns are listed below. We believe they have made improvements to the manuscript. As stated at the time of the initial submission, the manuscript is the result of our own original research, and has been submitted only to BMC PH and is not under consideration or peer review or accepted for publication or in press or published by any other journal. The manuscript does not duplicate any other previously published work, including our own. The revised manuscript contains 30 pages including references; figure and table legends; Figure 1, and Tables 1-2. The authors are Didier Jourdan, Julie Hellesøe Christensen, Emily Darlington, Ane Høstgaard Bonde, Paul Bloch, Bjarne Bruun Jensen, and Peter Bentsen. All authors have read and approved the final version of the revised manuscript. We confirm that all author details on the revised version are correct, that all authors have agreed to authorship and order of authorship for this manuscript, and that all authors have the appropriate permissions and rights to the reported data. Yours sincerely, The authors Responses to comments from the reviewers
Reviewer #1 The authors have done a great job of addressing the comments and I think this has improved the paper. I really like the table, and the presentation of the 'outcomes' has really improved the clarity of the paper. I think the paper is now ready for publication. Thank you very much. We agree that your comments and suggestions have improved the paper. I just had two other minor comments: I still think the title doesn't really reflect the topic, as it still reads as though it relates to interventions 'for' young people rather than focusing on 'involvement'. I suggest: The involvement of young people in the development of school and community based prevention interventions: A scoping review of designs and outcomes. Thank you for addressing this. We agree with you. We adopted the title suggested by reviewer one. The abstract is still a little confusing as it's not really clear what you mean by 'contextual factors or setting-based approaches'. I would stick to simply describing why 'involvement' is key in these sorts of interventions within the background section - this should hopefully ensure the reader is clear what the review is about. We have changed the abstract, based on reviewer s comment. We have removed 'contextual factors or setting-based approaches'. The beginning of the abstract is then: Since stakeholders active engagement is essential for public health strategies to be effective, this review is focused on intervention designs and outcomes of school- and community-based noncommunicable disease (NCD) prevention interventions involving children and young people.
Reviewer #2 I feel that this paper will make a welcomed contribution to the field of stakeholder involvement in school-community interventions targeting diet and physical activity. I think that the methods, results, and discussion sections have been appropriately modified based on reviewer comments. The discussion particularly has received much attention which strengthens the paper. Therefore my comments are largely based on the title and introduction of the paper. Thank you very much. We appreciate this. We also appreciate your time, efforts and work helping us to improve the paper. We agree that the last revision based on your comments and suggestions really improved the paper. In this revision of the manuscript, we have, as you suggested, focused on the title, abstract and introduction. The title needs further modifying to show that the review is limited to diet and physical activity interventions. Also this will serve the purpose of making the paper more visible for others potentially searching databases for diet and physical activity intervention papers. Please, also see Reviewer#1 s comment to the title and our response to this comment, above, since we have adopted Reviewer#1 s suggestion. The introduction could be strengthened through a few modifications: 1 - First, a better explanation of super-settings (integrating more than one setting to deliver an intervention) including whether their is empirical evidence of supersettings improving effectiveness or whether this is a theoretical implication at this point. Thank you for addressing this. We agree. In the new version of the paper, we have briefly explained the concept of the supersetting approach with reference to Bloch et al. (2014) and to Danish and Norwegian initiatives demonstrating interesting behavioural and structural outcomes, which are currently in the process of being published. 2- The paper uses phrases like 'activities offered to children' when addressing involvement - this terminology should be changed perhaps to something aligned to the level of involvement offered to children. On a side note, I do feel for the authors as the terminology in this area is highly debated and stems from different research disciplines (participation is often used in rights based
literature to denote active involvement, whereas I see reviewer 1 asked for a change to 'involvement' which aligns more with the recent 'patient and public involvement literature'). Thank you for spotting this. Yes, the terminology is debated and depends on the research field. Following reviewer one, we moved from participation to involvement since the term 'participation' is potentially confusing as 'participation' often refers to taking part in research as a participant rather than in a more advocacy/co-researcher type role. In the paper, we took care of the use of involvement, engagement and participation. Involvement, as understood in public health, is the focus of the review. Participation and engagement are use as more wide concepts. The requested changes have been made. 3 - The introduction does jump from one point to the next whereas a re-writing should try to streamline it and make sure that every paragraph is strongly making the point necessary. Based on your comment, we have rewritten the introduction in order tomake it more coherent.