Perceived Moral Norms in an Extended Theory of Planned Behavior in Predicting University Students’ Bystander Intentions toward Relational Bullying

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

thank you for providing me with the opportunity to review this manuscript. The topic presented in the paper is interesting, as is Moral Norms in an Extended Theory of Planned Behaviour to predict University Students’ Intentions as Bystanders in Relational Bullying.

The hypotheses tested overall propose an appealing analysis. A strength of the sample is the large number of participants

Although, the paper contributes new knowledge related to impact of COVID-19, yet there are few observations:

The technical description is timely and accurate, as is the graphical and tabular set-up. However, some points, if attended to by the authors with some additions, could further improve the quality of the work.

1) The introduction should be revised in translation, with a more synthesis, some passages are not smooth and there is too much redundancy and repetition.

2) The description of the instruments is not accurate also needs, in my opinion, to be expanded.

3) the discussion should be revised in traslation

4)there is a lack of a paragraph articulating the study's conclusions in a precise and detailed manner

Consult and add the following covid studie: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.773363

English must be edited

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for taking your time to review my manuscript. I appreciate your comments. Please find below your comments in bold letters, and my respective response underneath. Thank you very much for your collaboration and considerations!

The hypotheses tested overall propose an appealing analysis. A strength of the sample is the large number of participants

Thank you very much for taking the time to review my manuscript. I appreciate the inputs and acknowledgements.

Although, the paper contributes new knowledge related to impact of COVID-19, yet there are few observations:

Once again thank you for your acknowledgement towards the paper’s contribution related to the impact of COVID-19. However, the paper itself was not specifically design for assessing the impacts of COVID-19 on the students. Therefore, I came with the awareness that the recent pandemic will and most likely effect the data based on the participants personal experiences during the pandemic and the ongoing effects. Nonetheless, I have now taken your advice and added that the data was obtained in October 2022, in the methods section of the manuscript. The students in the UK had already returned to their campuses and mostly enjoyed physical classes. However, their social relationships and emotional states may still have been affected by the experiences they made during the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown in the United Kingdom.

The technical description is timely and accurate, as is the graphical and tabular set-up. However, some points, if attended to by the authors with some additions, could further improve the quality of the work.

1) The introduction should be revised in translation, with a more synthesis, some passages are not smooth and there is too much redundancy and repetition.

The text has now been revised for redundances and will now appear more concise. The English proofreading was done by a proofreading agency.

2) The description of the instruments is not accurate also needs,in my opinion, to be expanded.

Thank you for your feedback with that being said, the paper described The instrument description contained the vignette text, the cartoon images, all variables, the exact item wordings, scale ranges and labels, and means, standard deviations and reliability coefficients. I am therefore unsure in which ways it “is not accurate” or it could be expanded even more. However, I appreciate the concern and added information by describing which scales/items had been adapted from other studies with the respective references, and which had to be developed for this specific context. I hope that this is what was meant when it was asked for a more accurate description, and that the provided information is now satisfying.

3) the discussion should be revised in translation

The English proofreading was done by a proofreading agency.

4)there is a lack of a paragraph articulating the study's conclusions in a precise and detailed manner

Thank you for the suggestion! The template provided did not clearly require a conclusion paragraph unless the discussion is extensive. I have now added a last section dedicated to the conclusion in which I highlighted the main findings and implications of this study.

Consult and add the following covid studie: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.773363

This is an interesting study which holds meaningful implications for research on prosocial intentions. The aspect of empathic concern in relation to prosocial bystander intentions is investigated in another study which I am currently finalising. The provided reference will be gratefully considered in both manuscripts.

English must be edited

The English proofreading was done by a proofreading agency.

Reviewer 2 Report

Title

The title of the academic article you provided is quite informative, but there are a few potential errors and improvements that can be suggested:

Clarity: While the title is informative, it could be made more concise and easier to understand. Consider rephrasing it to make the main focus of the study clearer. Moral Norms" can be slightly vague. Specify what type of moral norms are being investigated. For example:

"Perceived Moral Norms”. The use of "Bystanders" implies a role or position, while "Relational Bullying" implies the behavior being observed. Consider using consistent terminology.

Abstract:

The abstract you provided is well-written and informative. However, I did notice a couple of minor errors:

In the sentence, "Based on research showing how bystanders in bullying incidents may counteract bullying effectively," the word "may" should be replaced with "can" to improve clarity and accuracy.

Revised sentence: "Based on research showing how bystanders in bullying incidents can counteract bullying effectively."

In the sentence, "Students’ behavioral intention towards in-person peer social exclusion in a hypothetical group work setting was investigated in a sample of N=419 university students in the United Kingdom," the phrase "N=419" should be moved to the Methods section and replaced with the actual number of participants.

Revised sentence: "Students’ behavioral intention towards in-person peer social exclusion in a hypothetical group work setting was investigated in a sample of 419 university students in the United Kingdom."

These are minor corrections, and overall, the abstract seems clear and well-structured.

In relation to the reviewed literature, many of the references cited in the literature review are quite outdated. It is recommended that no more than 50% of the references be older than five years. Additionally, it is suggested to consider publications from 2023 that focus on this topic or target group, such as IJERPH, Sustainability, Behavioral Sciences, and Education Sciences, among others. The inclusion of previous studies that provide valid and reliable results in the form of a bulleted list does not seem appropriate. It could perhaps be included in a table format.

Objective: The objective of the study is not formulated. Furthermore, the advantages and benefits of conducting this research are not sufficiently explained.

Method

There are a couple of minor suggestions for improvement:

1. Clarify the platform used for data collection: Instead of referring to "the scientifically supported platform Prolific.co.uk [39,40]," it would be more precise to state that the data was collected using the Prolific.co.uk platform, which is a platform commonly used for scientific research participant recruitment [39,40].

2. Specify the nature of the pilot sample comments: In the sentence, "Participants could openly comment on the questionnaire’s comprehensiveness," it would be helpful to clarify whether these comments were solicited for feedback or if they were purely optional.

The section regarding the methodology could be improved. It should include more information about the data collection procedure, response rate, the ethical committee that approved the project, and the treatment of missing data, outliers, etc.

Statistical analysis: The procedures of hierarchical regression analyses and mediational analyses are highly suitable. The results are presented clearly and rigorously.

Results: if it is possible, a graphical representation of the mediational results can enhance readers' comprehension.

Discussion:

Finally, it would be appealing to expand the section on limitations, future avenues of research, and the key contributions of the study. It is important to acknowledge that the sample size is small and predominantly consists of British students (87%) obtained through the Internet. ¿Can you ascertain that all participants are indeed students? Is there any method to ensure the accuracy of the information provided by participants regarding their age, gender, etc.?

Your paper holds significant implications for educators, psychologists, society, and policymakers; however, further elaboration on this topic is needed.

General comments Throughout the entire text, there are numerous abbreviations and acronyms, which hinder readers' comprehension. Please, endeavor to minimize the use of such abbreviations.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank you very much for taking your time to review my manuscript and for sharing constructive and precise recommendations. Please find below your comments in bold letters and my response underneath them. I appreciate your inputs and would like to say once again thank you very much for the collaboration!

Title

The title of the academic article you provided is quite informative, but there are a few potential errors and improvements that can be suggested:

Clarity: While the title is informative, it could be made more concise and easier to understand. Consider rephrasing it to make the main focus of the study clearer. Moral Norms" can be slightly vague. Specify what type of moral norms are being investigated. For example: "Perceived Moral Norms”. The use of "Bystanders" implies a role or position, while "Relational Bullying" implies the behavior being observed. Consider using consistent terminology.

Thank you very much for taking your time to review my manuscript and providing precise and meaningful inputs and suggestions. I highly appreciate your thorough work.

The title was revised and is now more concise.

The term “perceived moral norms” was consistently used throughout the paper. As you mentioned, it is very important to provide a concise title and to clearly distinguish between the bystander and the bullying behaviour (which is carried out by other individuals). I therefore changed the wording to create some more distance between them, and to clarify the relationship between the concepts. I hope that the revised title provides a more exact impression of the manuscript’s content. To allow future readers to find this study, I regard it however as important to keep all the components (perceived moral norms, theory of planned behavior, bystanders, bullying) within the title of the manuscript, as they all represent different research areas which one could search within.

Abstract:

The abstract you provided is well-written and informative. However, I did notice a couple of minor errors:

In the sentence, "Based on research showing how bystanders in bullying incidents may counteract bullying effectively," the word "may" should be replaced with "can" to improve clarity and accuracy.

Revised sentence: "Based on research showing how bystanders in bullying incidents can counteract bullying effectively."

In the sentence, "Students’ behavioral intention towards in-person peer social exclusion in a hypothetical group work setting was investigated in a sample of N=419 university students in the United Kingdom," the phrase "N=419" should be moved to the Methods section and replaced with the actual number of participants.

Revised sentence: "Students’ behavioral intention towards in-person peer social exclusion in a hypothetical group work setting was investigated in a sample of 419 university students in the United Kingdom."

These are minor corrections, and overall, the abstract seems clear and well-structured.

Thank you very much for taking into consideration these fine nuances and providing precise suggestions for revision. I gratefully incorporated your suggested revised sentences as stated above.

In relation to the reviewed literature, many of the references cited in the literature review are quite outdated. It is recommended that no more than 50% of the references be older than five years. Additionally, it is suggested to consider publications from 2023 that focus on this topic or target group, such as IJERPH, Sustainability, Behavioral Sciences, and Education Sciences, among others.

Thank you, I understand your concern. Unfortunately, the Theory of Planned Behaviour is well established and therefore the first primary literature may appear as outdated. I have incorporated sources on the literature from both the very early stages of its development, and more recently published works on the TPB in which Ajzen also drew consequences from the extensive research on his theory and made adaptations. However, some of the extensive meta-analyses and reviews on its general applicability were published around the year 2000. I have made efforts to find other more contemporary meta-analyses, and those I found related to fields that were rather far from the bullying and bystander topic (e.g. dentistry, musical education, …). Therefore, I have tried to expand the limitations section with some contemporary new references, and I hope that this will be satisfactory. For my future research, I will keep this important consideration in mind.

The inclusion of previous studies that provide valid and reliable results in the form of a bulleted list does not seem appropriate. It could perhaps be included in a table format.

I am not sure how to interpret this comment. If this relates to a statement followed by a few references in parentheses, I perceive this as a rather common practice in article writing. Otherwise, since this paper is not meant to be a literature review, I did not think a table providing an extensive overview of the field would be required.

Objective: The objective of the study is not formulated. Furthermore, the advantages and benefits of conducting this research are not sufficiently explained.

Thank you for pointing out the lack of an explicit statement of the study’s objective. The two objectives of the study are now placed above the hypotheses.

Method

There are a couple of minor suggestions for improvement:

1. Clarify the platform used for data collection: Instead of referring to "the scientifically supported platform Prolific.co.uk [39,40]," it would be more precise to state that the data was collected using the Prolific.co.uk platform, which is a platform commonly used for scientific research participant recruitment [39,40].

Thank you for offering this clear and sound formulation, which I have incorporated in the manuscript.

2. Specify the nature of the pilot sample comments: In the sentence, "Participants could openly comment on the questionnaire’s comprehensiveness," it would be helpful to clarify whether these comments were solicited for feedback or if they were purely optional.

They were optional, which I now more explicitly stated. I have reviewed the comments that were made, but they mostly related to the general design of the questionnaire (interesting, something different than the usual, relatable) or the importance of this research and suggestions for future research.

The section regarding the methodology could be improved. It should include more information about the data collection procedure, response rate, the ethical committee that approved the project, and the treatment of missing data, outliers, etc.

Thank you for making me aware of some points which I have missed. I have now elaborated more on the methodology and hope that this will be satisfactory.

Statistical analysis: The procedures of hierarchical regression analyses and mediational analyses are highly suitable. The results are presented clearly and rigorously.

Results: if it is possible, a graphical representation of the mediational results can enhance readers' comprehension.

Thank you very much! I perceive it as very encouraging to read your positive feedback. Three graphical representations of the mediational results were added.

Discussion:

Finally, it would be appealing to expand the section on limitations, future avenues of research, and the key contributions of the study. It is important to acknowledge that the sample size is small and predominantly consists of British students (87%) obtained through the Internet. ¿Can you ascertain that all participants are indeed students? Is there any method to ensure the accuracy of the information provided by participants regarding their age, gender, etc.?

I appreciate your concerns about the sample size and composition. A larger sample size would have been desirable, and I indeed hope to base future research on larger sample sizes. Nevertheless, the sample size of 419 participants may be considered for hierarchical regression analysis and even more complex analyses. This study is not designed to claim generalizability in any way, and I have stated this more clearly in the limitations of the manuscript after reading your comment, to ensure that this was not an aim. I could have widened the sampling area to other countries in which English is the de jure language, but in this case, I might have faced other issues like comparability of the cultural circumstances in those countries, etc. I therefore decided to collect data from a sample from only the United Kingdom (which is geographically the closest English speaking country to the country that I do my Ph.D. studies in). Consequently, the sample is predominantly of British nationality, which of course limits the transferability of the results to a considerable extent.

Your paper holds significant implications for educators, psychologists, society, and policymakers; however, further elaboration on this topic is needed.

Thank you for this remark. I have added new information to the the section on implications.

General comments Throughout the entire text, there are numerous abbreviations and acronyms, which hinder readers' comprehension. Please, endeavor to minimize the use of such abbreviations.

Most abbreviations were removed from the text, only two very commonly used abbreviations were kept: theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and higher education (HE)

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors, I would like to congratulate you on the manuscript you have written, both for the subject matter it deals with and for the way it is written. However, I would like to suggest some areas for improvement.

- Before the hypotheses, you do not define the objective of the research. You should state it and then specify it in the hypotheses.

- On the other hand, the H1a-e system is somewhat cumbersome. It would be better to write them as H1, H2, H3, etc., even if it means repeating part of the statement.

- In the method, they should explain the type of research they have proposed in order to respond to the hypotheses put forward. They start directly with the procedure and sample. I recommend some articles https://doi.org/10.3916/C68-2021-09; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094450

- It is recommended that a representative figure of the mediation model be drawn up where the contributions of each variable to the model and the representativeness of each variable in explaining the hypotheses put forward can be clearly and precisely seen.
- The discussion should be focused on answering the hypotheses of the research and in this section there is no mention of them. Restructure this section so that it is coherent with the hypotheses and not just a mere formality for the elaboration of the article.
- The section on conclusions is missing.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 

thank you very much for taking your time to review my manuscript. Please find below your comments in bold letters and my response underneath them. I appreciate your suggestions and the collaboration!

Dear authors, I would like to congratulate you on the manuscript you have written, both for the subject matter it deals with and for the way it is written. However, I would like to suggest some areas for improvement.

Dear reviewer, thank you very much for taking your time to comment on my manuscript. I received your review report almost one week after I received the first two reports, and had already taken some of your comments into consideration as they also appeared in another review report.

- Before the hypotheses, you do not define the objective of the research. You should state it and then specify it in the hypotheses.

Thank you very much for this observation. I have stated the two objects of the study more clearly before the hypotheses.

- On the other hand, the H1a-e system is somewhat cumbersome. It would be better to write them as H1, H2, H3, etc., even if it means repeating part of the statement.

Once again thank you very much for your concern. I have not received any negative feedback on this previously, neither in the two other review comments, nor from colleagues whom I have presented my ideas to. I understand that some might find the combination of numbers and letters complex. However, this paper will be part of a dissertation with more complex analyses coming up which will require the statement of even more hypotheses that need to systematized, and I would like to keep this system consistent throughout three papers.

- In the method, they should explain the type of research they have proposed in order to respond to the hypotheses put forward. They start directly with the procedure and sample. I recommend some articles https://doi.org/10.3916/C68-2021-09; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094450

Once again, thank you for your valuable feedback. I have made the necessary changes accordingly.

 I would also like to share my thoughts on the two papers you suggested to look at:

(Moreno-Guerrero, A., Soler-Costa, R., Marín-Marín, J., & López-Belmonte, J. Flipped learning and good teaching practices in secondary education. [Flipped learning y buenas prácticas docentes en educación secundaria]. Comunicar 2021, 68, 107-117.)

Thank you very much for your recommendations. I would like to point out that this paper https://doi.org/10.3916/C68-2021-09 is in Spanish language and I have not found an English version of it. Hence, I am unable to make judgements on its contents.

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094450 (Rodríguez-García, A.-M.; Marín-Marín, J.-A.; López-Núñez, J.-A.; Moreno-Guerrero, A.-J. Do Age and Educational Stage Influence No-Mobile-Phone Phobia? Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18, 4450. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094450)

This paper contains an informative example, and I have made changes to my paper accordingly. Thank you very much for your recommendation.

- It is recommended that a representative figure of the mediation model be drawn up where the contributions of each variable to the model and the representativeness of each variable in explaining the hypotheses put forward can be clearly and precisely seen.

Your feedback is highly appreciated. This point has been brought forward by another reviewer as well, and I have provided graphical representations of the three mediation models.

- The discussion should be focused on answering the hypotheses of the research and in this section there is no mention of them. Restructure this section so that it is coherent with the hypotheses and not just a mere formality for the elaboration of the article.

The discussion has been structured following the hypotheses, but to emphasize the structure, I have added the corresponding hypotheses in the text.

- The section on conclusions is missing.

Thank you for the suggestion! The template provided did not clearly require a conclusion paragraph unless the discussion is extensive. I have now added a last section dedicated to the conclusion in which I highlighted the main findings and implications of this study.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors, thank you very much for the replies to the comments and suggestions. I see that the work is now more complete.

Best regards.