Older People’s Knowledge Creation Motivations for Sustainable Communities

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for the editorial board for letting me review this article. It is a qualitative research paper, from which I have learned a lot about the theories and methods of qualitative analysis. It is of great significance for deepening my future research content.

In this paper, authors investigate how the older adults stimulate knowledge creation in 15 community activities and conducts content analysis on the in-depth interview data to identify four scenarios: recall, resonance, reuse and reward. The topic is innovative and the entry point is good.

There is a problem need authors to address. The authors mentioned that “Community-dwelling older people who participate in community activities are both consumers and providers of social support services, to investigate this duality, we draw on social identity theory and employee passion” (Line 70). However, following only introduces what these two theories are, but there is no detailed introduction on how to apply them to the subsequent research and even the construction of the model, which is somewhat out of line with the latter part.

Author Response

1. Thanks for the editorial board for letting me review this article. It is a qualitative research paper, from which I have learned a lot about the theories and methods of qualitative analysis. It is of great significance for deepening my future research content. In this paper, authors investigate how the older adults stimulate knowledge creation in 15 community activities and conducts content analysis on the in-depth interview data to identify four scenarios: recall, resonance, reuse and reward. The topic is innovative and the entry point is good.

• The author really appreciates the reviewer’s insightful and encouraging comments.

 

2. There is a problem need authors to address. The authors mentioned that “Community-dwelling older people who participate in community activities are both consumers and providers of social support services, to investigate this duality, we draw on social identity theory and employee passion” (Line 70). However, following only introduces what these two theories are, but there is no detailed introduction on how to apply them to the subsequent research and even the construction of the model, which is somewhat out of line with the latter part.

• Thank you for the comment. We applied the two theories for data collection. As mentioned in lines 133-138, we set up questions of interview (i.e. research framework) from the two theories.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I would like to congratulate the authors for their interest in researching in this field, however, the work presented presents some deficiencies.

 

a) Keywords are correct, although they could be more appropriate and representative of the study conducted. I suggest that the authors modify some of them to make them more representative.

b) Abstract is correct in general terms but does not provide sufficient information on the methods applied to process the information.

Abstract indicates the object of the research, the data acquisition, but does not shows a complete synthesis of the results but only a sketch of it.

Authors should include this information in this section.

 c) Authors should avoid the use of the first person grammar in the development of the document, both in singular and plural. There are many samples of this aspect that should be corrected throughout the document (lines 16, 19, 70, 96,…).

d) The authors propose interesting data acquisition, but the processing of the data is neither clear nor sufficient for an investigation such as the one presented.

In Chapter 2 and more specifically, in lines 125-136, there is no description of the methodology used.

Neither is the statistical processing of the data specified, nor is there any coherence between the survey and the results presented in Chapter 3.

It is not comprehensible, through the document, to know how the authors arrive at these results and consequently, it is not possible to consider the subsequent sections since the reader does not have a basis on which to base his or her appraisals.

The authors should completely reconstruct these chapters in accordance with the structure of a scientific article, explaining the processing of the information and making it clear how they arrived at the results and conclusions presented.

I hope that these changes will help to improve your article and make it a document of great scientific interest.

Author Response

1. I would like to congratulate the authors for their interest in researching in this field, however, the work presented presents some deficiencies.

• The authors would like to thank you for pointing out the scope for improvements and acknowledging the potential of this paper. I have polished the manuscript along with each comment so that you can understand our intention.

 

2. a) Keywords are correct, although they could be more appropriate and representative of the study conducted. I suggest that the authors modify some of them to make them more representative.

• The author has revised keywords “sustainability,” “local community,” and “social support” to “passion,” social identity,” and “sustainable community.”

 

3. b) Abstract is correct in general terms but does not provide sufficient information on the methods applied to process the information. Abstract indicates the object of the research, the data acquisition, but does not shows a complete synthesis of the results but only a sketch of it. Authors should include this information in this section.

• We revised abstract to clarify our methodology (lines 17-18). Due to the limitation of the words number, the authors believe that describing outline and structure of the findings has bigger impact than explaining detail of the model.

 

4. c) Authors should avoid the use of the first person grammar in the development of the document, both in singular and plural. There are many samples of this aspect that should be corrected throughout the document (lines 16, 19, 70, 96,…).

• We received proofread from Editage, the biggest proofreading company in our country, and improve English grammar for the whole of the manuscript.

 

5. d) The authors propose interesting data acquisition, but the processing of the data is neither clear nor sufficient for an investigation such as the one presented. In Chapter 2 and more specifically, in lines 125-136, there is no description of the methodology used. Neither is the statistical processing of the data specified, nor is there any coherence between the survey and the results presented in Chapter 3. It is not comprehensible, through the document, to know how the authors arrive at these results and consequently, it is not possible to consider the subsequent sections since the reader does not have a basis on which to base his or her appraisals. The authors should completely reconstruct these chapters in accordance with the structure of a scientific article, explaining the processing of the information and making it clear how they arrived at the results and conclusions presented.

• This study used a qualitative approach, so we did not apply any statistical processing in the methodology. We revised the manuscript according to the reviewer’s comment to clarify coherence between analysis and results and the limitation of quantitative approach. (Lines 146-148, 434-436).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I have no other comments.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your reviewing.

Reviewer 2 Report

I would like to congratulate the authors for their interest in researching in this field, however, the work presented presents some deficiencies.

The authors would like to thank you for pointing out the scope for improvements and acknowledging the potential of this paper. I have polished the manuscript along with each comment so that you can understand our intention.

 

a) Keywords are correct, although they could be more appropriate and representative of the study conducted. I suggest that the authors modify some of them to make them more representative.

The author has revised keywords “sustainability,” “local community,” and “social support” to “passion,” social identity,” and “sustainable community.”

Thanks to the authors for the correction made.

 

b) Abstract is correct in general terms but does not provide sufficient information on the methods applied to process the information. Abstract indicates the object of the research, the data acquisition, but does not shows a complete synthesis of the results but only a sketch of it. Authors should include this information in this section.

We revised abstract to clarify our methodology (lines 17-18). Due to the limitation of the words number, the authors believe that describing outline and structure of the findings has bigger impact than explaining detail of the model.

Correction is adequate although I would have liked it to have been a little deeper.

 

c) Authors should avoid the use of the first person grammar in the development of the document, both in singular and plural. There are many samples of this aspect that should be corrected throughout the document (lines 16, 19, 70, 96,…).

We received proofread from Editage, the biggest proofreading company in our country, and improve English grammar for the whole of the manuscript.

Authors state that there is no grammatical defect and indeed, there is no such defect. However, there is a defect of style when using the first person grammatical form in scientific or formal documents. This grammatical form should be replaced by impersonal forms in this document.

 

d) The authors propose interesting data acquisition, but the processing of the data is neither clear nor sufficient for an investigation such as the one presented. In Chapter 2 and more specifically, in lines 125-136, there is no description of the methodology used. Neither is the statistical processing of the data specified, nor is there any coherence between the survey and the results presented in Chapter 3. It is not comprehensible, through the document, to know how the authors arrive at these results and consequently, it is not possible to consider the subsequent sections since the reader does not have a basis on which to base his or her appraisals. The authors should completely reconstruct these chapters in accordance with the structure of a scientific article, explaining the processing of the information and making it clear how they arrived at the results and conclusions presented.

This study used a qualitative approach, so we did not apply any statistical processing in the methodology. We revised the manuscript according to the reviewer’s comment to clarify coherence between analysis and results and the limitation of quantitative approach. (Lines 146-148, 434-436).

I cannot find the correction cited by the authors. While there is a small change, it is not clearly stated how the data have been processed or whether the sample chosen is representative. This is independent of the type of analysis performed, qualitative or quantitative, but is essential for the reader's understanding of the document.

 

f) References 3 to 31 have lost their formatting. The authors should revise this point for the final document.

 

I hope that these changes will help to improve your article and make it a document of great scientific interest.

Author Response

I really appreciate for the reviewer's careful and detailed comments.

c) "there is a defect of style when using the first person grammatical form in scientific or formal documents."
We understand the reviewer's concern. However, passive voice sometimes cause redundancy. We discuss with proofreaders to reduce first person grammatical form (e.g. line 99) but we also take a valance of readability. I believe the reviewer may understand our revision.

d) "While there is a small change, it is not clearly stated how the data have been processed or whether the sample chosen is representative."
Thank you. Following the reviewer's comment, we added more explanations (lines 102-103; 139). In terms of the analysis process, we have already explained that coding has two processes (136-139) and we found four scenes (themes). Then, we arranged these themes with two axes.

f) "References 3 to 31 have lost their formatting. The authors should revise this point for the final document."
Thank you. We revised the format of references.