Adolescence during a Pandemic: Examining US Adolescents’ Time Use and Family and Peer Relationships during COVID-19

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

MS Youth 1571901 2022

This paper, entitled “Adolescence during a Pandemic: Examining US Adolescents’ Time Use and Family and Peer Relationships during COVID-19” uses a person-centered approach to examine correlates of time use patterns of youth during COVID 19.  The manuscript provides a thoughtful discussion of this interesting topic. 

Overall, I feel the study has potential. However, I had some concerns about the way the introduction was structured and findings interpreted. My specific comments are detailed below.

The introduction was choppy, with each topic introduced by subheadings instead of using transitional language, or an introductory paragraph, to link all the topics together. It felt like reading a laundry list, instead of a cohesive introduction to a very important topic. Then, when we got to time with family and friends, there were suddenly sub headings, including the current study. I didn't understand what happened to all the other topics--it was a little like experiencing whiplash, suddenly being tossed from one subject to another, landing on the last one for no apparent reason.

Perhaps it would be better to build up the "time with family and friends" argument, supplementing with theory and diving deep into that research, instead of only offering a surface discussion of 6 other topics.

Once I got to the method section, I understand that the first 6 topics were actually part of one larger topic--how adolescents spend their time. Perhaps this could have been more clearly explained from the beginning, so it would be obvious why each topic was being discussed.

The authors noted they used a planned missingness design, which creates data MCAR. Were the missing data then imputed? I didn’t see this mentioned anywhere. If so, how were the imputations done? If not, how were the missing data accounted for?

Results: although the entire age range of participants could for sure be included in the “adolescent” stage of life, the age range was very broad (12-21). Should all youth be included in the same time-use clusters? Were older youth more likely to be in the “work” category, for example? Did age make a difference in any other way? I would be curious to see if the clusters were rerun for the younger as well as the older age groups if the same clusters emerged, or if they looked different for the different developmental periods of adolescents (e.g., early/middle vs. middle/late).

I was not able to view Figure 1. I would like to see how the clusters were represented in the figure. Also, perhaps it would be helpful for the reader to include some of the summary statistics (e.g., means, or other information) in a Table so it is easy for the reader to examine the variables and their characteristics all in one place.

Discussion: “Education focused” may be a misleading category, as this was in august. Some schools may have been in session--was region of country taken in to account in any of the analyses?

Also, when introducing each are where youth spend time, one of the consistent differences that appeared in the literature was by ethnic or racial group. In the current data, ethnic and racial identity was not associated with time use patterns. The authors note this, but do not speculate on why no ethnic or racial differences were found in the present study. Is it because it was a self-selected non generalized sample? Because COVID threw everything off balance? Another reason? I would be interested in the authors' ideas on this.

Overall there were some copy-editing issues that made the manuscript difficult to read; for example there were some instructions to the author that were included in the ms in the middle of the introduction, and many words were divided with a hyphen as if they were going to be spread over two lines, but they were not. The references also need a lot of attention, with many references appearing in the text and not the citation list, and vice versa. Perhaps if the authors used a citation software such as Endnote, this issue could be avoided in future drafts.

Author Response

We appreciated the thoughtful feedback on our work, and below, we provide point-by-point responses.

1. Reviewer 1 felt the introduction was choppy and ideas were not tied together. We took several steps to address this concern, including: (1) a stronger introduction paragraph that sets the stage for what is to come, (2) revised headings under the time use section, so it is clear that each brief review of time use is couched within a larger conversation, and (3) a summary paragraph at the end of the time use section that brings the ideas together.
2. Both Reviewers suggested that we make the compensatory versus continuity model idea more central to our paper. In response, we did add more detail to this section. However, we refrained from using these ideas to frame the entire paper, as examination of friend and family relationships was only one of our study aims.
3. As stated in section 5.3, we used full information maximum likelihood (FIML) to handle missing data. This is a common and well-regarded approach to missing data estimation, and we selected it over multiple imputation due to feasibility in incorporating it with our latent profile approach.
4. We added a definition to the beginning of the methods section to justify our consideration of 12-21 year olds as adolescents. However, the reviewer’s point was well taken that age was not included as a predictor of the classes, and this was an omission on our part. Thus, we have rerun the multinomial logistic regression models to include age as a predictor. Age is significant in the models (workers are older than the other two groups, on average), and interestingly, now multiple other demographic factors are significant predictors of latent classes after accounting for age. We have updated the results and discussion sections accordingly.
5. We have repasted figure 1 with larger font, to make it more viewable, and at the reviewer’s request, we also added a table of the item means for each time use indicator.
6. We carefully considered the feedback on the naming of the education-focused group. Ultimately, we feel it is the best name for the group, given the heightened time spent on educational activities compared to other groups. This was the most distinctive feature of this group. However, we now acknowledge as a limitation that schools opened at different times and we cannot be sure what kind of educational activities adolescents are doing.
7. Thank you for this question asking us to reflect on the lack of findings with race and ethnicity. There are multiple possible reasons for the differences in our findings and previous literature: A main one is that we are examining time use in clusters rather than each type of time use separately, which makes our analyses not directly comparable to past research on specific types of time use. Another reason could be the COVID-19 pandemic. However, after adding age to the models, we do have more findings related to race and ethnicity. We added some tentative interpretations of these findings to the discussion.
8. We apologize for the copy-editing issues. There were some snafus in transitioning our manuscript to the journal’s formatting requirements. We have now removed instructions to the author from the introduction and removed unnecessary hyphens in words. We have now carefully checked and updated the reference section.

Reviewer 2 Report

this paper has some merits, and could be of interest. There are some concerns which would require amendment before consideration for publication could be considered:

1. the main issue is a lack of coherent and clear theoretical framework. The literature review also is a bit thin and inconsistent with much older literature and a spate of newer COVID-19 related literature. the theoretical framework and thin literature review go together in terms of needing further refinement and attention. addressing this adequately should also assist in clarifying the originality and major contribution of the study which is not clearly defined or convincing at present. There a number of different ideas presented, but none clearly focused on (e.g. Positive youth development, continuity and compensatory models for interaction are the two that stand out and could perhaps be chosen to frame the theoretical perspective? ) it would also be good to frame some specific research questions linked to the theoretical approach.
2. adolescence generally according to WHO/UNICEF etc is 10-19, so as this study includes up to age 21, the authors may consider terminology of youth, or young people?
3.  there appears to be some part from standard template in the middle of page 2, lines 67-71 which should be deleted. 

Author Response

We thank Reviewer 2 for their feedback and below respond to the specific comments raised:

1. Reviewer 2 was concerned with a lack of theoretical framework and also felt the major contribution could be more convincingly described. We addressed the first point by adding a theoretical framework section to the introduction, which situates our study within a relational developmental systems theory framework. We also did more to introduce our ideas and the contribution of the study at the outset of the paper. Both Reviewers suggested that we make the compensatory versus continuity model idea more central to our paper. In response, we did add more detail to this section. However, we refrained from using these ideas to frame the entire paper, as examination of friend and family relationships was only one of our three aims.
2. We added a statement at the beginning of the method section to justify our use of adolescence. Specifically, we state: “Our age range is compatible with contemporary definitions of adolescence that span age 10 to 24, which has expanded in response to science of biological and social growth that extends through the mid-20s (Sawyer et al., 2018).”
3. We have removed this standard template language from the manuscript.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The review is much improved following the complementary recommendations from myself and the other reviewer. The increased focus on racial/ethnic diversity is very interesting. I would like to suggest that the authors consider a step further in consideration that as summer 2020 was not only a peaking period of the pandemic, it also was a very tumultuous time of racial tensions in the US. Thus, I wonder how that might also be a factor in the findings regarding racial/ethnic differences. The findings about white youth working more also made me wonder about 1) political orientation (aka virus is fake), and/or 2) ses which could relate to the type of employment (e.g. whether it can be done remotely). 

Author Response

We appreciate Reviewer 2’s additional comments and suggestions. We now more explicitly recognize that summer 2020 was a time of racial justice uprising. We elaborated a statement that already mentioned this on p. 2, line 70-71, to specifically refer to the murder of George Floyd. In the next paragraph, we added a statement referring to the dual pandemics of systemic racism and COVID-19 that intersected in summer 2020 to disproportionately impact youth of color and their communities. We also added to an existing statement on page 3 in the civic engagement section, mentioning the context of racial justice protests in summer 2020. We also added a statement referencing the salience of systemic racism in summer 2020, in section 7.5 (implications for theory and research). Besides these multiple mentions of this context, we did not directly use this context to inform or interpret findings related to Latinx and Asian youth, because little research has examined how these racial/ethnic groups responded to the Black Lives Matter movement resurgence in 2020.

We did not include measures of political orientation or attitudes about COVID-19, so we can’t discern whether working youth were more skeptical about the virus. We added this statement as a limitation to the findings, in section 7.4.

We had neglected to add our finding pertaining to parent education to the discussion of working youth. We now state that these working youth may be from lower-income families, although more robust measures of SES would have better shown this (see p. 14).