Pre- and Post-Activity Anxiety for Sustainable Rafting

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I am grateful to the editorial group and authors for the opportunity to review and assess this article.

The article discusses rafting's ability to reduce anxiety levels. For this purpose, a simple and well-explained introduction is given, including the presentation of the practice as a Nature Sport and the basic definitions of anxiety.

In my opinion, although the authors have been entirely clear, their introduction needs to include a more elaborate justification of how and why rafting can be attributed with such a quality.

They claim to be doing a study on "State Anxiety", but in both the key words and the results stated in the abstract they talk about "Trait Anxiety". This is either an error or is intentional and confuses the reader making it difficult to understand the authors' intentions in this research.

Similarly, in the methodology it is stated that the questionnaires are used to measure both types of anxiety. The design (Pre-Post) established by the authors seems correct for the first case, but, in my opinion, inadequate to analyse "Trait anxiety" given that only a single activity is available. In no case will the results be able to demonstrate any link with rafting.

The selection of participants should also be justified, as it is implied that it is a selection for convenience, but this is not explained in the article.

The authors use non-parametric tests in their analysis without justifying their choice. Although it is true that in most cases where this type of questionnaire is applied, the variables do not follow a normal distribution, a test should be included to verify whether or not they follow a normal distribution (Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, for example). Or, at least, justify its use.

Variables are not normally distributed, the use of the mean is not appropriate to show the central values of physical activity and anxiety. Again, the mean is used in the results when non-parametric tests are shown. In this case, it should be the median that is analysed, in addition to a graphical display of the results to observe their distribution. The interpretation of the results obtained is therefore not well defined.

The discussion of the results is affected by the same errors. Furthermore, the results are limited to this specific sample, making it difficult to extrapolate them to the rest of the population. The sample selected is very specific and not representative.

In any case, according to the data provided, the effects of rafting on State Anxiety only seem to be significant in the case of women and not in men.

In short, I recommend a better justification of the object of the study and the methodology of analysis used. Similarly, the authors should correct errors in the choice of statistics (means) and in the presentation of the data.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for the opportunity of reviewing this manuscript (sustainability-1629592). In my opinion this is a piece of research of academic and clinical interest for detecting pre- and post-activity state anxiety for sustainable rafting. I hope that the considerations contributed will help them to improve the manuscript. To facilitate the task, I have some questions about some crucial points:

Major Revision

1) “The sample has 100 subjects of a Nature Sports company.” Are these 100 samples (from only one company) enough to support research? How is the sample size confirmed to be sufficient?

2) As a rule of thumb, some researchers recommend use very large sample sizes (i.e., at least 10:1 to 20:1 subject-to-item ratio). How many items are there for each scale: Self-Assessment of Anxiety Questionnaire (STAI) and International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ)? Please clarify your stand on the issue. I highly recommend that the authors should increase the sample size for the study.

3) Page2: Participants: How to ensure the quality of data collection? Is there any missing data? If yes, how to deal with it? How about the sampling strategy? It would be useful to describe it more. More information about the sampling method is needed here. Furthermore, where, when, and how were participants approached? What mode of survey administration was used (online or paper-and-pencil)?

4) Page 3:

STAI: These questions are presented on a four-point Likert scale where 1 represents "Not at all" and 4 "Very much" IPAQ: This questionnaire is divided into four parts featuring the weekly frequency (number of times) and the time (minutes/day) spent on: 1) vigorous-intensity activity, 2) moderate-intensity activity, 3) walking at least 10 minutes at a time, and 4) hours sitting and/or lying down (except for sleeping) per day.

I recommend responses to items in these instruments are ordinal data (the Likert-based score) instead of continuous variable, with small samples, please do not use mean ± SD, and so on.

5) Statistical methods are too simplistic, with only rank correlations and nonparametric tests.

6) The manuscript should benefit of a final proof editing.

Take care and my best,

Your reviewer

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors have send to me the new version of the article for a new review.

In my first review I said:

“In my opinion, although the authors have been entirely clear, their introduction needs to include a more elaborate justification of how and why rafting can be attributed with such a quality.

They claim to be doing a study on "State Anxiety", but in both the key words and the results stated in the abstract they talk about "Trait Anxiety". This is either an error or is intentional and confuses the reader making it difficult to understand the authors' intentions in this research.”

No significance changes have been made to the article.

In the methodology section, I said “Similarly, in the methodology it is stated that the questionnaires are used to measure both types of anxiety. The design (Pre-Post) established by the authors seems correct for the first case, but, in my opinion, inadequate to analyse "Trait anxiety" given that only a single activity is available. In no case will the results be able to demonstrate any link with rafting.”

One again, no significance changes have been made to the article for this.

The selection of participants is more clear now.

Authors have change the “mean” by the “median”. That’s right. However, the graphical display showed in the result section seems to be four normal distributions from four continuous variables (Figure 1). I ask authors to verify this. At lines, 224 and 225 authors are still talking about “mean”.

The authors insist on continuing to talk about differences between pre and post test. However, Wilconxon’s test showed a non-significance difference except for women. In my opinion authors shouldn’t talk about those differences (except for women) in a general way. So, Table 3 may be confusing.

The discussion is still affected for those issues. For example, authors say at lines 299-302: “Miranda et al. [24] support interconnection between anxiety and physical activ- 299 ity, stating that it has an anxiolytic effect on anxiety levels, thus reducing the degree 300 of anxiety. The benefits of physical activity in anxiety symptoms are unquestionable 301 [25]. And, at lines 322-323 “Thus, we concluded that, on average, rafting activity lowered anxiety levels, thus meeting its charisma of leisure activity and contact with nature [29]”. And at lines 342-343 authors insist “When comparing the values of State-anxiety state anxiety before and after the 342 activity, we found that 55% showed less anxiety after the activity.”

But the anxiolytic effect of Rafting has only been evidenced for women. Data and statistical test showed a non-significance difference for men’s activity. So, discussion should be review completely.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

1) Line 85 to 87, “Rafting is an activity framed in the stereotype of SN, which, due to the place of practice and its leisure aspect, it is expected that it influences the state of anxiety of  its practitioners as mentioned by [ 33], this way, the practice of outdoor sports has an anxiolytic effect”

Is this sentence finished? If yes, missing punctuation.

2) Statistical Analysis, Please rewrite to 2-3 paragraphs.

3) I still think the sample size is too small.

Thank you and my best,

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have made the proposed changes, resulting in a much clearer article. I have no further suggestions.