Reviewer’s report
Title: 
Investigating the status of marital burnout and related factors in married
women referred to health centers
Version: 
0 
Date: 
21 Sep 2020
Reviewer's report:
This work aims to determine the status of marital burnout and related factors in
married women referred to health centers in Iran. There is a number of issues
that I believe should be addressed. There are significant formatting issues. The
entire document needs copy-editing and proofreading for language and
grammatical errors. Please fin below my comments.
Abstract:
-- what do Numbers in brackets mean? Please specify.
-- What do the authors mean by "the status of marital burnout in women is not
appropriate"? This sentence does not seem to make sense. Please revise.
Introduction:
-- Overall, I see vague statements, vague assumptions, unsupported by evidence
(e.g., page 4, line 8 - "Given the important roles and responsibilities that women
have in married life, such as training 83 and upbringing of children, doing
housework, responding to the needs of the husband, and 84 sometimes working
outside the home, …"). I strongly recommend that you provide empirical support
to your statements: for the given example, is this statement related to the Iranian
sociocultural context? are there any official unemployment rates for women? I
think it's unwise to assign housework and "responding to the needs of the
husband" to women, and to generalize on such matters.
-- The study objectives are not clear. Which contributing factors to burnout are
authors aiming to investigate? Please be precise. Also, please add hypotheses to
the introduction.
Methods:
-- Please define clear and precise inclusion criteria. 
Results:
-- The first sentence of the results section is incomplete and does not make sense
"According to the results of this study, the mean (standard deviation) of the
participants was ...". Please revise.
-- Table 1: We recommend to change the term "housekeeper" to "unemployed"
-- What do first lines of tables 3 and 4 represent? Are these Peens marital
burnout subscales? This needs to be clarified in all the tables.
Discussion:
-- First paragraph should summarize ALL main results.
-- The authors compared their results with literature data without taking into
account socio-cultural and religious differences. These differences could partly
explain the high scores of marital burden perceived by women (for example,
housework and domestic responsibilities would be mainly assigned to women,
and can even be seen not only as a role, but also as a divine duty in the Iranian
context).
-- Again, this section contains vague statements unsupported by evidence; e.g., : 
Line 186: "The difference in the results can be due to different cultures of
marriage in different parts of the world. Over time, the excitement of the early
years of marriage may diminish. Also, couples' attention to issues such as child
care, employment, and financial problems can gradually reduce the couple's
attention to each other and play a role in marital burnout."
Line 195: "One reason for this could be the long working hours of people with
self-employed than other people. Since the working hours of these people are not
precisely defined or longer than other jobs, the lack of adequate presence in the
home, lack of attention to family, not spending enough time for their spouse, can
be the reasons for increasing the burnout of their wives."
Line 217: "Usually, as the number of children in the couple increases, they do
not have enough time for each other, the relationship between them decreases,
their attention to each other decreases, and eventually the marital burnout
between them increases. Also, as the number of children increases, the amount of
time and energy that couples spend with them increases, which can eventually
lead to somatic burnout."
All these problems must be solved. I strongly recommend that you provide
empirical support to your statements.
-- Line 258: This sentence discusses limitations of the study, not very thoroughly
though. The primary limitation is the cross-sectional study design. It is also
important to note, that some of major confounders are not discussed. For
instance, psychological variables (e.g., depression, anxiety) and stressful life
events were not assessed in this study. This is not a negligeable limitation, as
these factors may impact considerably the levels of marital burnout in.
-- I believe that the discussion section would be much stronger if it provided
specific implications of the Study findings. These recommendations should be
supported by studies of empirically supported interventions. How would you use
these results for an intervention? What future lines of research are
recommended?
-- Finally, there are significant issues with grammar throughout, should this
proceed to publication I believe that it would need thorough editing to ensure
readability and precision. I acknowledge the significant difficulty in preparing a
manuscript in a language other than your primary language, and respect the
effort that this requires. 
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Is the study design appropriate to answer the research question (including the use
of appropriate controls), and are the conclusions supported by the evidence
presented?
Yes
Are the methods sufficiently described to allow the study to be repeated?
No
Is the use of statistics and treatment of uncertainties appropriate?
Yes
Is the presentation of the work clear?
Yes
Are the images in this manuscript (including electrophoretic gels and blots) free
from apparent manipulation?
No