Evaluation of Self-Reported Agricultural Tasks, Safety Concerns, and Health and Safety Behaviors of Young Adults in U.S. Collegiate Agricultural Programs

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The work concerns the topic of safety and health during agricultural work.
The work is well written. The results are properly analyzed, 
legible and accurately presented.
I only wondered why the authors limited themselves 
to a detailed presentation of only the use of sunscreen and headphones against noise. 
Are there other ways to minimize health risks in agricultural work?
I generally recommend this work for publication.

Author Response

Please see attachment with response to all reviewers. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

In my opinion the authors must improve several parts of the paper in order to make it more significant and methodologically valid.

Author Response

Please see attachment with response to all reviewers. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

This is a basic descriptive study drawing on data from an existing survey instrument. From my understanding of the literature, this is the first specific study assessing farm safety knowledge and practices for this age cohort that are also involved in collegiate education. To this extent, the study may represent a potentially important baseline assessment, however none of the results are particularly surprising.

 

The authors have provided a detailed overview of the results in the discussion section and have noted several pertinent limitations to the study. In particular, the low response rate to the follow-up survey makes any inferences from the study difficult to validate.

 

 

Some issues that the authors should consider:

1. Was there any validation of questions and assessment of response reliability (especially given self-report nature of survey)? The authors correctly note self-report as a limitation, but more detail about steps to maximise the rigour of the results would be beneficial.
2. While crashes and near-misses were assessed, clearly there was no assessment of injury occurrence or severity. In terms of longer-term outcome measures resulting from the training (which I understand could not be attained in this current pre-post design), this will be important and should be noted in the discussion.
3. Did crash events just relate to roadways and not other locations on the farm? This appears to be the case and I can understand the logic to assessing roadways, however in relation to exposure (time), it is likely that on-farm use would be significantly greater (and hence possibly more likely to result in an incident). Can the authors clarify this and define if there were also crashes (incidents) on-farm as well as on roadways. Also I agree with the authors that the male over-representation is likely related to overall exposure for the roadway crashes.
4. There is a number of statistical analyses undertaken which brings into question the impact of multiple testing effects on the results. It is noted that the significance level has been set at 0.01, however can you clarify how this was determined in the methods section (Bonferroni etc.)? 

Author Response

Please see attachment with response to all reviewers. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

The paper aims at assessing health and safety tasks, concerns and behaviors of young adults, involved in collegiate agricultural programs. It is in line with the scope of the journal, and the special issue. It provides useful suggestions for better development of agricultural health and safety training programs that must be uniquely tailored, accounting for differences in gender and education.

Before to be published, the manuscript has to be improved in some parts. The main interventions are the following:

Title

The title should be revised. Midwestern is known to the US readers but not for the rest of the world.

Abstract

A single paragraph of about 200 words maximum: 252 words instead of 200.

Keywords

List three to ten pertinent keywords specific to the article yet reasonably common within the subject discipline; 11 keywords instead of 10 maximun.

Introduction

According to the existing academic literature, are there other similar researches? Are there surveys conducted to this end? Which is the novelty of your paper? Please, provide a scientific background to justify the interest for the publication.

Methods

The text has not been edited, often using different typology of fonts and relative sizes.

Results

The quality of figure is important. Please, standardize the equality among all the figure respecting the Journal roles. Also in this case, you didn't take care about the manuscript editing.

Discussion

This is the first time you mention a previous study. What is the state of art? Is this topic enough analyzed by others, or not? I noticed that there are only two previuos studies simlar to yours. Did you search for academic paper in Elsevier and/or Clavirate platform? This could be also important to understand the value of your reaserch in the academic field and the lack of this data.

Reference

Please, revise editing. It is not compliant with the Journal roles.

Details in pdf file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see attachment with response to all reviewers. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper does not present features of innovative or high quality aspects, yet it is interesting enough. 

Reviewer 3 Report

Authors have addressed the concerns raised adeqately.

Reviewer 4 Report

The authors followed suggestions. Thus, the paper has been improved and it is ready to be published.