Urban-Rural Dichotomy of Quality of Life

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review your manuscript reporting a study of urban-rural dichotomy of quality of life. The topic itself is very interesting and I found your review informative, albeit atheoretical despite a claim to the contrary (reference to theoretical background in the abstract). Unfortunately, there is no clear description of your methodology, so I have no idea what type of data you collected or how you’ve treated that data to derive your results. This has consequences for the rest of the paper, because results and discussion sections rely on the established clarity and validity of an appropriate methodology. This is possibly the reason that your discussion and conclusion sections are merely repetitive of results and method with no interpretive benefit or additional insights into what the findings convey and how they might translate into impact.   

I have some specific comments either because there are issues that must be addressed or for you to take into consideration, but this is by no means an exhaustive list. I’ve used highlights in the manuscript file to indicate where corrections are needed.

Abstract

“In the Theoretical background part…. In the Quality of life part…. In the Measurement and findings part….” I recommend finding another way to word this; there is no need to refer to specific parts, for instance. Each word in abstract is important so use them more efficiently.  This could include clarifying something about the “two “by products””. Should be hyphenated as by-products.

Introduction

Lines 28-29. “Is the quality of men or of women higher?” Should specify ‘quality of life’ of men or of women. If wanting to reduce verbosity could use the common acronym, QOL.

Lines 36-37. “Own measurements are published by the OECD or The Economist Intelligence Unit.” What do you mean by “Own measurements”?

Materials and Methods

The structuring of the paper is not standard. The methods section usually describes the study design, participants, measures and procedure. The analysis of the relevant literature is what usually comes first in the form of a literature review, followed by research aims and hypotheses, followed by the method section. It is odd to read the literature review as part of the method section. The review itself was very interesting but it would be better placed before the methods section, and used to funnel down the topic so that research aims become clear as do hypotheses.

As for participants, were the university students residing in the respective university city at the time of completing the questionnaire? What were they instructed with respect to responses (i.e., focus on residence of origin rather than residence of study)? Were any/all studying remotely from their home residence or were they studying away from home? What was the age range of the sample (Mean, SD)? Was ethical approval granted for the study? Were participants given the opportunity to provide fully informed consent for their participation?

I don’t get a reasonable sense of the study design or of how variables were operationalized for measurement and analysis. You indicate using “questionnaires on social networks” (what does this mean?) without sufficient description of the questionnaires (including item types and response formats) or the procedure for collecting the data.

·         Which measures or items did you use?

·         Were they named/validated measures or did you create them yourselves?

·         Did you use an online survey?

·         If so, which survey platform used?

Results

It's difficult to follow results given the method has not been described clearly. I don't know what to expect here in terms of results as a consequence.

Lines 416-418. “In the paper, we use the indicator of the first group in the combination of the first and third alternatives. Quality of urban life as well as quality of rural life are measured by a subjective indicator on a scale of 0-10, the measured values are in Table 9.” You need to clarify the source of your data. In the abstract you indicate: "we measure quality of life with a subjective indicator on the Cantril scale, and derive findings from these measurements." What is the specific 'subjective indicator on the Cantril scale' that you used? 

Lines 421-422. “Table 9 shows that the measured mean values of the quality of life and other variables are higher in cities than in villages, our hypothesis is confirmed. We obtain more detailed data when we split the urban-rural dichotomy into males and females.” To confirm the hypothesis you need to perform a statistical test of the hypothesis. Just a comparison of means in this way doesn't confirm the hypothesis.

Line 424. “variables are always higher for men.” According to which criteria?

Lines 428-430, Table 10. “Quality of life and happiness have a subjective dimension, they can be summed up into one value and labelled as “psychological matter”. On the other hand, quality of place and quality of environment have an objective dimension, we can sum them up into one value and denote them as “geographical matter”.”  It isn't clear what you've summed for each of these. For example, 24.99 is the sum of what for rural/psych matter?

Line 437. Where are your statistical tests of this difference? Only significant if statistically so, taking into account the variability.

Line 448, but query applies across all correlations. Did you use Pearson's correlation? I assume so because you refer somewhere to an index of 0-10 but you describe in sufficient detail so that readers can understand not only what you report but how you derived all of your values.  Because you've not described your method clearly I'm not sure exactly the sort of data you collected, but I wonder if possible to perform regression analysis so you get a better understanding of what might be a predictor or not, and not just an association?

Lines 453-454. Also, a correlation indicates a relationship whereby values of one variable vary in alignment with values of another. Following what you define as a 'predictor', this could just as well be taken to read that quality of life is strong predictor of happiness.

To be fully informative as to whether these correlations are significantly different from each other (e.g., for men vs. women, or for villages vs. cities) you could perform t-tests of the correlations.

"One approach to testing the difference between correlations is to transform the correlations to Fisher Z scores. Formulae are available to calculate the standard error of the difference of these Z scores, then calculate the ratio of the difference to the standard error and compare this ratio to a standard normal distribution." Snedecor, G.W., & Cochran, W.G. (1980). Statistical Methods. Iowa State University Press: Ames IA. (Chapter 10)

Tables 13-18. It seems that there is a more economical way to display comparative values in tables. For example, tables 13 & 14 could be combined as follows, with correlation values for Villages on the lower diagonal, values for Cities on the upper diagonal. The same could be done for other comparisons (e.g., Men vs. Women, in Villages and in Cities).

Correlations – Villages versus Cities, men and women combined

Note. Correlation values for Villages on the lower diagonal, values for Cities on the upper diagonal

Lines 481-486. 1. Need a difference test of significance to support this claim. Correlation values reflect associations, not differences (i.e. higher/lower). 2. Define 'unusually.' 3. The values you've reported are correlations; what do you mean by 'lowest'?

Line 485. You make a claim about a ‘difference’ being significant, but you don’t seem to have performed any significance tests of difference.

Discussion

The discussion is problematic in that the method and results were not sufficiently described or explained or properly reported. Discussion of findings is thereby difficult to follow. The ‘conclusions’ are merely repetition of previous content with nothing of note added.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank for comments. Our answer is in attechment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Some remarks for improvement:

1-Maybe it is possible to join the mentioned two aims into one?

2 -In some places seen interchangeably used concepts - quality of life and wellbeing - is it the same for the authors? Or they make some distinction? This should be clarified in theoretical part. The authors should give their notion / concept of quality of life what they follow in the article.

3-Why the sample is university students at bachelor, master and doctoral but not sample of urban or rural residents? There could be some arguments/explanation.

4-The questionnaire should be described in more details - what questions, answers were used, types of questions, etc. Does the questionnaire specific according to sample? Or it could be applied to other social groups?

5-In some places it was mentioned that QoL is an indicator important for policy makers/decisions - maybe it was useful to look at national or local documents/strategies if quality of life is mentioned there, in what contexts???

6-We see the results about The Quality of Life Index - maybe it should be presented and explained in methodology part, but not results-what indicators or variables it includes, what scale for evaluation is used, etc.

Author Response

Thank for comments. Our answer is in attechment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you for the opportunity to read the paper entitled „Urban-Rural Dichotomy of Quality of Life“. Your paper is promising, however, there are several issues that, in my opinion, authors should necessarily address.

 The authors need to explain why the study only covered two of the fourteen regions of Czechia.

 The Methodology section should be presented a bit in more detail about what methods were used, why, when, and how the study was conducted. Can you describe the sample? The statistical basis of this part should be more consistent and powerful.

The characteristics of the study participants are missing, I think it would be interesting to see what they looked like. The authors need to disclose a bit more information here.

I suggest if you can provide the detailed questionnaire used for the survey, data collection in the supplementary it will be great.

 In the discussion section, some associated literature must be added to compare and contrast the key findings with the existing studies.

Indicating similarities and differences. If there are no differences, why should your study be published? If everything has already been discovered and your study does not provide anything new, it does not need to be published. 

 Moreover, the paper should have limitations and a future research section at the conclusion.

I will be very glad and thankful to see these adjustments.

Author Response

Thank for comments. Our answer is in attechment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review your revised manuscript. The revisions appear to be mostly cosmetic with the use of the QOL acronym throughout. Various other changes have introduced repetition of passages here and there; repetition is best avoided. The methodology remains insufficiently detailed to allow replication of the study. 

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors, 

Most of my suggestions have been incorporated into the revised version. I can see that the authors put a lot of effort into modyfing the paper. 

Now the article has a more universal dimension and I believe that it may interest readers.  

I do not see any further objections to its publication.

Kind regards