Title: Experiences of family violence and parental unavailability in childhood in relation to
parental socioeconomic position and psychological problems: A cohort study of young Swedish
women 1990 – 2013
Version: 2 Date: 04 Jan 2021
Reviewer's report:
This study aims to study the occurrence and co-occurrence of parental psychological problems,
child neglect and socio-economy. The association between psychological problems in parent
and various children outcome is well studied. However, as the author mention at the very end,
how various aspect of parenthood co-exists needs further attention.
Although the sample is not representative of the Swedish female population it contains several
interesting parental characteristics and the authors manage the skewed distribution by presenting
weighted estimates. However, the manuscript needs some corrections and clarifications before
publication.
1) Low socioeconomic status, often assessed as low level of parental
education has found to be associated with for example criminal behavior, and substance abuse,
but also medical conditions like cardiovascular diseases. Home environmental factors associated
with level of education is often not know even though other factors than the level of education
are plausible confounding or mediating factors explaining the association. I therefore think is
should be worth referring to some of these studies to further explain the need to study how these
home environmental factors co-occur.
Methods and results
2) The term longitudinal is reserved to studies with repeated assessments on the study subjects.
As far as I understand this study follow the same population but with unique subjects in each
wave. The term longitudinal should therefore be avoided.
3) I am hesitant to the high proportion of subjects in the high SEP category. That 20-50% (Figure
1) of the young women have at least one parent with # 5 years university studies is unexpectedly
high as for the included cohorts this would correspond to post-graduate studies. Also, please
clarify the low SEP category, non-skilled and skilled blue-collar, does that represent parents
without any education at the university level?
4) Please correct the CIs for maternal rejection in Table 1. Two of them do not contain the
estimated value.
5) The Result section should focus on estimated effect sizes and not on whether the p-values is
just above or below 0.05. For example, OR of 3 or 6 is quite high, while OR between 0.66 and
1.5 is rather week even of the one limit of the CI is equivalent to 1. Consequently, phrasing like
“Marginally significant” should be avoided. This is also in line with the STOBE guidelines.
6) Please make it clear in the results section that the analyses provide estimated OR and not RR
(risk ratios) and that OR are always more extreme than RR. In other words sentences like  “After
adjusting for cohort and age at interview, we found that women of parents with low or medium
SEP were three times more likely to experience family violence in childhood than women of
parents with high parental SEP (last column in Table 2)” need to be rewritten.
Discussion
7) The aims stated in the discussion should be consistent with the aims in the background.
8) The author states “However, the results indicate an inverse association for high parental SEP:
women of parents with high SEP were more likely to experience paternal lack of time” If this
association has not be seen in other countries please reference. If not, it is a bit odd to suggest
that this association could be explained by the Swedish welfare system.
9) At the end the authors states: “As parental psychological problems and substance abuse are
strongly related to various kinds of child neglect [20], knowledge about the role of childhood
experiences of parental unavailability in form not having enough time is scarce.” Agree, and I
think the manuscript would benefit from a discussion focusing on the role these co-occurrences
play for previously shown associations.
10) See also comment 6 above, I am not saying it is wrong to say that “but a higher parental
socioeconomic position was associated with a higher prevalence of paternal lack of time”
However, it should be made clear that this association is week.
11) At the end it is also important to remind the reader that one limitation of the study is that
is focuses on women only.