Longitudinal Protective Factors against Intimate Partner Violence for Women Born in Australia and Women from Refugee Backgrounds

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The current research aims to identify trajectories of IPV experiences over three years, including protective factors associated with reduced risk of IPV. The submitted manuscript has many strengths such as the use of longitudinal approach and a hypothesis driven ecological approach to determine sociodemographic characteristics associated with the latent trajectory classes.

First, the introduction is well thought out and addresses the main themes of the topic.

Regarding the method, all sections are correctly specified. The methodology used is correct, but it always has some limitations.

The presentation of the results is good, the tables and figures in the manuscript make it easy to understand.

Regarding the discussion of the results, I pose some questions:

1.    When the authors say in the discussion  “The Changing group represents a large, heterogenous group of women in this study who report changing patterns of IPV type and/or occurrence across time. This finding shows that measuring IPV at a single time point may fail to capture the magnitude of the population of at-risk women or the nature of women’s experiences as they and their families undergo different life stresses. Some women reported lifetime IPV at one time point and then later reported the absence of lifetime IPV. Reporting may be related to the salience of the abuse at the time, trust in the interviewer, time pressure and emotional readiness to remember past abuse on the day of the interview”, can they support you with any of the bibliographical references?

2.    Why didn’t the women’s past trauma emerge as significant when taking the full ecological system into account? (in Australian born cohort)

3.    As the authors note, time varying protective factors may have shifted over the course of the data collection period. Why were the protective factors only measured at time point 1?

Finally, authors must review bibliographic references because they don’t follow the same rules.

Author Response

Regarding the discussion of the results, I pose some questions:

1. When the authors say in the discussion  “The Changing group represents a large, heterogenous group of women in this study who report changing patterns of IPV type and/or occurrence across time. This finding shows that measuring IPV at a single time point may fail to capture the magnitude of the population of at-risk women or the nature of women’s experiences as they and their families undergo different life stresses. Some women reported lifetime IPV at one time point and then later reported the absence of lifetime IPV. Reporting may be related to the salience of the abuse at the time, trust in the interviewer, time pressure and emotional readiness to remember past abuse on the day of the interview”, can they support you with any of the bibliographical references?

We thank the reviewer for this comment. We have added some references to this section.

2. Why didn’t the women’s past trauma emerge as significant when taking the full ecological system into account? (in Australian born cohort).

We have added the following to the manuscript.

“For both cohorts this may be because the experience of IPV was more closely related to other factors (such as current financial stress or post-migration living difficulties).”

3. As the authors note, time varying protective factors may have shifted over the course of the data collection period. Why were the protective factors only measured at time point 1?

The number of time points and complexity of the analysis precluded the use of time-varying covariates in this analysis.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Author(s),

your article entitled “Longitudinal protective factors against intimate partner violence for women born in Australia and women from refugee backgrounds.” immediately caught my attention. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this paper. It arouses interest to continue reading to the end and smoothly.

This study can be a starting point for understanding violence in this specific setting.

However, I believe there are minor revisions to consider in order to refine this study. Here are my suggestions that I hope will be useful to you:

  row 86, page 2: What do you intend for the following: "0406379619 anna" ?

Tables are not correctly numbered: why before table 2 and then table 1 for example?

Author Response

  row 86, page 2: What do you intend for the following: “0406379619 anna” 

We have deleted this typo.

 

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