Title: Hotspots and determinants of women’s discriminatory attitude towards people living with
HIV; Evidence from Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey data
Version: 3 Date: 05 Sep 2022
Reviewer's report:
Review Report BMC Maternal Health
Hotspots and determinants of women’s discriminatory attitude towards people living with HIV;
Evidence from EDHS 2016 data
Thank you for the opportunity to review the revised manuscript entitled “Hotspots and
determinants of women’s discriminatory attitude towards people living with HIV; Evidence
from EDHS 2016 data”.
The authors describe a secondary analysis of national survey data to determine discriminatory
attitudes from women of people living with HIV in Ethiopia. They describe which regions are
hotspots for these types of attitudes.
I hereby provide my second review of the above title manuscript using the track changed
document provided. To address issues that were not directly addressed, this article still needs
a revise and resubmit.
General: Manuscript still has some could language inconsistencies and grammatical issues, for
example in the background section death is capitalized (line 81).
Further, as stated previously, the manuscript would still benefit from a thorough review to ensure
clarity and readability.
A lot of the original questions from the first review were not directly answered and corrected
in the article but the authors did answer them in their responses to reviewers. Suggest they go
through again and add to the manuscript to clarify the original points and questions made.
Abstract:
The authors addressed previous comments.
Background:
Review for language and grammatical errors, use of acronyms needs to follow general language
rules and edit the background as needed. The author did address some of the previous issues,
but a second review would be beneficial to clean up the article and improve readability.
Methods:
The authors addressed and provided further description and any references linking to the EDHS
are needed in the methods section.
The authors did address the sample size and data extraction process and the new figure they
included addresses previous issues. However, they still did not address the issue of defining a
cluster, assuming it is an enumeration area, define that. This is still unclear and will need to be
addressed before publication.
Not addressed in the article directly but authors did address in their comments back to reviewer,
suggest they incorporate some of their answers into the actual manuscript. See below for the
pieces they should focus on answering.
Explain the GPS data, do the authors mean that there was associated coordinates or other
geographical data attached to each response?
For the missing data that was excluded, the authors states that this was due to missing outcome
data, outcome data is not well defined or explained, suggest the author includes that in the
methods section.
The model descriptions are incomplete and should include variables used and how they were
created. There is no definition or link to variables to determine which are deemed individual or
community level as stated.
Results:
Review language and grammatical and formatting issues within this section.
Table 1 should include total column.
The author should define what they mean by “most likely cluster” within the article, they
answered this question in their response to reviewers but not in the article itself – this is not clear.
Still not answered in the article: Table 3 – suggest the author reviews this table and clarifies
what the ID is referring to and how number of cases/expected cases were derived. Define also
primary and secondary clusters and how they were calculated/determined.
What is a high-risk cluster? Needs to be defined in the article itself.
Discussion:
The authors strengthened the discussion based on reviewer comments.
Limitations/Strengths:
Further the limitations of the use of these data/missing data and methodologies used were revised
and updated.
Conclusions:
The authors strengthened the conclusion based on reviewer comments.