Evaluation of Existing Indexes of Sustainable Well-Being and Propositions for Improvement
Scott A. Cloutier
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Line 52: “… show that Sustainable …” add “the” before “Sustainable”
Line 54: “The top 5 of the Human Sustainable Development Index (which is the Human Development Index completed by the per capita carbon emissions) show that the top 5 (Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and France) show a high ...” could be better formulates as: The top 5 of the Human Sustainable Development Index (which is the Human Development Index completed by the per capita carbon emissions) highlight that these countries (Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and France) show a high ...”
Line 71: “… there are indexes who show …” “who should” could be “indicating” or “highlighting”
Line 73: explain HPI before using the acronym. Also do this for other acronyms.
Line 98: I would change the title from “Presentation of the existing sustainable well-being indexes” to “Existing sustainable well-being indexes”. Also the other titles could be changed this way (it is obvious that you are presenting information in the sections)
Line 110: add closing quote (which is now on line 117) in: It comes from a “mix of official and non-official data sources.
Line 132: why is “only” in this sentence: “As far as well-being only is concerned…”?
Line 204: “EF index” —> English Proficiency?
Line 217: “Earth Overshot day” should that be “Earth Overshoot day”? Like you have it on line 366…
Line 218: could the link be included in a footnote? Having such link in the text is not very nice. Same for line 291.
Line 445: is the caption complete? “Source: authors” seems weird.
Line 507: “Building a good index is an art” which might be the problem you are trying to solve in order to conclude “Building a good index is a science”
I have a major problem with the many unexplained acronyms in the paper. For sure some (e.g. GDP) will be known to the reader but nevertheless one should always introduce an acronym before using it (or reference to a table with acronyms).
In the overview of existing measures of well-being I am missing existing measures that build on the confidence respondents have in the future / life expectations. I think this is an essential approach to measuring well-being that should be included in the overview.
In your discussion on criteria for evaluating the quality of measures you state: “When expanding a bit further, statisticians focus on other criteria: 1) Relevance (attractiveness+ responsiveness), 2) Accuracy and reliability 3) Timeliness and continuity, 4) Comparability (level of harmonization between Member States), 5) Clarity (easiness in understanding, communicability).”. I fail to understand the link between attractiveness / responsiveness and statistics… As a statistician I can see the match with “validity and reliability” of course.
You conclude that “The situation is different on the reliability side, since there are more variations in affective measures that lead to lower coefficients of in the test/retest reliability…”. Is that per definition so for affective measures? It sounds to me like an issue in the operationalisation of the concept. There are plenty of psychometric instruments that have high reliability (in the statistical sense) for the assessment of affective concepts.
I like the overview in table 1. My suggestion would be to reference it earlier in the text for the reader to have an overview picture when working through section 3.
On the statistics (i.e. correlations and significance) I would like to see more information about the selected statistical technique. Additional, I think there would have been better statistical techniques (e.g. structural equation modelling) to explore the option for better measures. With that it would be less of an art and more of a science ;-)
Author Response
Thanks for your comments. Please find my responses attached.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Please reframe your paper. In general, your conclusion and findings are not impressive as a standalone section. If you more cleanly connect them to your methods and introduction, that could change.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Thanks for your comments. Please find my responses attached.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The survey is interesting. It requires major revision like as follows:
- Title should be corrected.
- Literature survey is inadequate. The authors are advised to add recent articles.
- The research gap between your work and the existing literature should be clearly stated in revised version.
- The feasibility of the terms should be justified with proper illustration.
- More figures are require to depict your objectives for the article.
- Please discuss the convergence of your optimized outcomes.
- The conclusion section is too short. Please elaborate considering limitations of the proposed model. Give outlines how you can overcome those limitations.
- Please check grammatical bugs and typos.
Author Response
Thanks for your comments. Please find my responses attached.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Please see attached file.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Thank you for these feedback, we hope this current version suits better your expectations
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
My comments have been correctly adressed.
Author Response
Thank you for your feedback
Round 3
Reviewer 2 Report
Be very clear, before final submission, that your paper is digestible and understood in its nature. You could do so by sharing with some friends/colleagues.
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
