Reviewer’s report
Title: 
Perceptions of Firearms in a cohort of Women Exposed to Intimate
Partner Violence (IPV) in Central Pennsylvania
Version: 
1 
Date: 
08 Oct 2020
Reviewer: 
Daniel Adeyinka
Reviewer's report:
Perceptions in a cohort of Women Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)
Reviewer: Daniel Adeyinka
The authors have made remarkable revisions on the manuscript. The authors
have clearly provided the policy environment and context. Furthermore, the
contribution of the paper has been provided. Nonetheless, there are few issues
that remain to clarified.
Comments to the authors
Page 6, line 4: "…..about firearm safety to create a conceptual framework for
this study. Our conceptual model, shown in Figure 1, characterizes gun
ownership…." There is a conflict in the choice of conceptual framework and
conceptual model. From Figure 1, it appears that the authors were referring to a
conceptual model. Also, state the theory driving the model. 
Page 10, line 9: The authors mentioned unadjusted bivariate models, however,
table showing bivariate associations is missing. What is the bivariate model
contributing to this manuscript? I was expecting that the results from bivariate
analysis would be used for calculating changes in odds ratios to detect
presence/absence of confounding or fit a parsimonious multivariate model.
Page 10, line 58: The SAS software needs referencing.
Page 14, line 50: "Also limiting is our initial response rate from our participants
recruited from the ambulatory care cohort, with an initial 2,500 surveys resulting
in 1,191 responses (a response rate of 47.6%)…" While this is an obvious
limitation, I will recommend a sensitivity analysis to determine if the study
findings are generalizable to the non-respondents.
Table 2: For clarity, can the authors specify multivariate analysis in the title? 
The variable "age" is malpositioned in the table. Also, remove "reference" for
age since it was treated as a continuous variable.
There is a typo in table 2. The authors wrote "High school gradue or less". "T" is
missing in "graduate"
The operationalization of variables in tables 1 and 2 is contradictory. For
example, Table 1: education was categorized as high school or less, some
college, and college or more, whereas in table 2, it was coded as College
graduate, high school graduate or less, and some college.
The legend for table 2 is confusing. The superscripts for variable names show
higher aOR; this labelling is unconventional. The significant odds ratios also
bear similar symbol with "Higher aOR indicates easier"
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Declaration of competing interests
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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
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Yes
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No
Is the presentation of the work clear?
Yes
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from apparent manipulation?
Yes