Transcultural Adaption and Validation of Korean Version Freibrug Mindfulness Inventory (FMI): Assessing Mindfulness in Forest Therapy Sessions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Although it is difficult to say that there are established regarding evidence measurements with regard to the effectiveness of forest bathing therapy, it would be beneficial to measure the versatility of forest therapy if it could be effectively translated into Korean, considering that the FMI translation has spread to Europe, China and other parts of the world. The significance of the study is acknowledged. There is validity in the translation procedure due to the variation in the number of specimens and their attributes.

There is a well-founded review of the creation of a Korean version of the Freibrug Mindfulness Inventory (FMI). The next step is to use this scale to measure the effectiveness of forest therapy.  

I have a particular question regarding item 13.

・If the problem with item 13 is that it is not suitable for Koreans, are there national differences in mindfulness? Line 228 "A previous validation study of the FMI demonstrated similar results and suggested to remove question 13 [33]" indicates that this previous study is not likely to have been conducted on Koreans.

・Line 227 “question 13 was the only reverse-scored item” 

Item 13 is the only reversal item out of 14, but if it is attributed to validity, does this not mean that respondents did not respond well to the reversal item and that some respondents answered incorrectly due to lack of attention? What is the point of including a reversal item in the question in the first place The benefit of inserting a reversal item into a survey question is that it allows for the exclusion of those who responded dishonestly. Instead, shouldn't this item be utilized and used as one of the criteria to determine whether a response is valid or not? How does the demonstration in other languages deal with this item? You refer to this as a potential error due to translation, but we would like some more explanation on this point.

・Line 224-226 “ The poor fit of item 13 is attributable to cultural differences [54] or potential errors in 224 the translation. Despite contributions from multiple translators proficient in both English 225 and Korean, historical, societal, and linguistic aspects of words may be altered during 226 translations [55, 56].”

Wouldn't one item in a shortened version of 14 items be a partial missing element in capturing the effects of mindfulness? What does "potential errors in the translation" mean? If there are historical, social and linguistic factors at play, can't we just make the translation fit the history and society of Korea?

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Table 1. The last column can be separated into two, it will be more readable. 

Table 2. You can remove the Korean version of the FMI since in the additional files it was placed. I leave the decision to the editors of the journal. 

I have no more comments on the work.

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you so much for your nice paper. It is very good, and I have only 9 suggestions, with 4 major ones:

1. Please could you add more keywords for better indexing?

2. Please avoid using one-sentence paragraphs.

3. Lines 86-87. Please could you describe in more detail these two factors?

4. Major. Please describe in more detail: Data collection section. What company did you use? Did you provide reimbursement for participants?

5. Major. Measures should be described in more detail, including language version of questionnaires, examples of statements in each subscale, indicators of psychometric performance. Also, descriptive statistics for all study variables should be presented (M, SD, Ske, Kurtosis and min-max) in a form of table (Cronbach's alpha can be indicated here too).

6. Line 212, Please do not use asterisks in the title of the table.

7. Sections 4.1 and 4.2 are overlapping, please reconsider this.

8. Major. Section "4.3. Mental health effects of forest therapy" seems irrelevant for this paper as this paper is a psychometric paper. Please justify/edit/reconsider.

9. Major. Concurrent validity should be discussed in the discussion. Discuss also internal consistency reliability coefficients. Please describe all and main statistical analyses you did. You did a lot, but described only the factor structure. Please describe more, and make your paper stronger.

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for your work. This version is better, however, there are some important issues which should be addressed.

1. Please start a discussion with a short and general description regarding the aim of the study and the work done.

2. I do not believe that adding fit indices to discussion section is good. Please use a rather psychological language than statistical one in the discussion.

3. Line 257: Please merge this paragraph with the next one.

4. Lines 268-276: Please reconsider this as there are many statistical terms here. Try not to use abbreviations of subscales when you provide discussions. Please use "positive affect" instead of "PANAS positive" etc.

5. Please do not use "On the other hand" if you have no "On the one hand" before, e.g., lines 274.

6. Lines 291-298: I appreciate the authors' will to present possible practical implications of the validated measure, however, these lines 291-298 in my opinion are really irrelevant. Please reconsider this. In general, you can provide new areas of research which you plan to do and where this scale will be very helpful. Indicating theoretical models by Gregory et al. seems to be disconnected with the other parts of the paper.

As for my previous review form regarding one-sentence paragraphs, I do not find them in the first version of the paper. Possibly, I mistakenly treated two short sentences as one sentences. Excuse me for this.

I encourage the authors to reconsider their response to previous comment (see review form 1) regarding descriptions of measures. The questionnaires were not described sufficiently (see lines 127-133). The authors argued that there is a word limit. However, in the journal's guiedlines it was stated:

"Article: These are original research manuscripts. The work should report scientifically sound experiments and provide a substantial amount of new information. The article should include the most recent and relevant references in the field. The structure should include an Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusions (optional) sections, with a suggested minimum word count of 4000 words". 

This paper is an Article type paper. Therefore, no limits are here. Please reconsider the paper according the above-described suggestions.

Author Response

We greatly appreciate your comprehensive review of "Transcultural Adaption and validation of Korean version Freibrug Mindfulness Inventory(FMI): aspect of accessing mindfulness in forest therapy session". Your suggestions have significantly improved the clarity and organization of our study. We have thoroughly addressed the feedback and would greatly value your second review. The structure of the responses has remained unchanged from the previous round. Please see the attachment. The changes are highlighted in yellow within the manuscript. Please see in blue font below for a point-by-point response to the reviewer's comments and concerns. All page numbers refer to the revised manuscript file. My co-author and I would be greatly appreciated if you would look over the attached document and the revised text. Once again, we thank you for consideration for publication in Forests.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 3 Report

Thanks for improvements. However, the paper needs to be edited.

1. Lines 277-279: Typos and one-sentence paragraphs are unwanted. Please reconsider.

2. Line 239: An abbreviation FMI was introduced previously. There is no need to use a full title of questionnaire here.

3.  Lines 134-140 are confusing. It is unclear what questionnaire the authors describe. Please describe questionnaires step by step: Title, what measures, how many subscales, examples of statements in each subscales, response scale, what higher (or lower) scores mean. Also, references for original and Korean version of questionnaires should be provided. 

The PANAS is described well, please add information regarding subscales, meaning of higher scores, and provide examples of statements. 

The BDI was described insufficiently. Lines 146-150 are irrelevant. I believe readers would not want to read history of the BDI development. But they would like to focus on what this questionnaires measure and other aspects indicated above.

Please reconsider the paper with more attention. The paper is in general nice, but after second review the paper wad prepared somewhat inattentively, with too many typos.  

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf