Reviewer's report
Title:"A man's gonna do what a man wants to do": African American and
Hispanic women's perceptions about heterosexual relationships: a qualitative
study
Version: 3Date:30 March 2013
Reviewer: L. Monique L Ward
Reviewer's report:
This study presents qualitative interview data from 60 African American and
Hispanic women concerning their sexual and romantic relationships ideals,
scripts, and strategies. The goal of this study was to shed some light on
gender-related scripts that may be affecting HIV risk-related sexual behavior and
negotiations among high-risk populations. This is a revised version of the
manuscript, and I was a reviewer of the initial manuscript. I address below the
extent to which the authors addressed my initial concerns with this revision, and
raise some further concerns.
MAJOR COMPULSORY REVISIONS
1. I had asked the authors to incorporate existing research on sexual scripting
theory and on The Heterosexual Script. These theories were indeed cited.
However, the findings from these studies and related works were not really
incorporated into the conceptual foundations of the paper. I had assumed that
the authors would use the existing findings and theories to guide their specific
research questions. I was expecting to see sentences like, “Drawing on Sexual
Scripting theory/Drawing on the premises of the heterosexual script, we would
expect that women would express . . .” But this was not the case. The study is
presented as a vague exploration of the role of gendered scripts in sexual
decision making. But it doesn’t need to be vague. It doesn’t need to be
exploratory. There is existing work, both theoretical and empirical, that should
give them a sense of what to expect.
2. I had asked the authors to provide more framework to understand the findings.
Right now, it is not clear what questions the participants were asked that
produced the results. This revision may have been attempted, but was not
successful. I still kept asking what the questions were that respondents were
addressing.
Perhaps the larger problem is that there is just too much going on in the study. It
is too vague, too big, too exploratory. There is probably enough data for 4 or 5
papers. Lumping it all together, for a paper on gendered sexual scripts, makes it
too big and mushy to be truly beneficial to the literature. I feel that there are many
studies that have asked similar, general, questions. The authors need to do a
better job of selling and identifying their uniqueness and the specific questions in
the field they are answering.
I also think the population is still too broad, both in age and ethnicity.
MINOR ESSENTIAL REVISIONS
3. I think it would be useful to give information about the speaker with each
quotation, such as age, race, and marital status.
LEVEL OF INTEREST
If the authors could scale down the study into clear research questions, it is “an
article whose findings are important to those with closely related research
interests.”
QUALITY OF WRITTEN ENGLISH - Acceptable
STATISTICAL REVIEW - The manuscript does not need to be seen by a
statistician.
DECLARATION OF COMPETING INTERESTS - I have no competing interests.
NEXT STEPS
Reject because too small an advance to publish. Right now the research
questions are too vaguely defined to know how this is contributing.
Level of interest: An article whose findings are important to those with closely
related research interests
Quality of written English: Acceptable
Statistical review: No, the manuscript does not need to be seen by a
statistician.
Declaration of competing interests:
I do not have any competing interests.