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: 2Date:24 January 2013
Reviewer: Catherine MacPhail
Reviewer's report:
Major Compulsory Revisions
Page 18: There is a large amount of information in Table 2 and I found it quit
challenging to assimilate it all and relate it to the text. I wonder whether it would
be possible to provide more guidance through the table? I think that this would be
made more apparent if the headings used in the table were also used in the text.
At present there is little to really link the two.
Page 22: I was disappointed in the brief attention given to the issue of HIV risk
perception. It would have been an interesting contribution to the literature had the
authors examined the disconnect between the comments women made about
their expectations and acceptance of partner infidelity and perception of their own
risk. Although the title of the paper doesn’t suggest that HIV prevention is the
main focus of the paper – I did think that this aspect of the data was dealt with
superficially.
Minor Essential Revisions
Page 7: “In this paper we explore heterosexual African American and Hispanic
women’s beliefs . . .”
Page 9: “Participants in Florida were given the option on informed consent in
either English or Spanish.”
Page 9: “. . . (recruitment and data collection process is described in greater
detail in [46]).” (missing final bracket)
Page 9: “Women also provided information on whether a partner she “knew or
suspected” that her partner had other sexual partners.”
Page 11: in the text 38% of women are documented as earning less than
$12,000 but in the table the percentages add up to 39%
Page 11: I would suggest removing ‘approximately’ from the discussion of the
percentage of women from FL born outside the US. Your figures are exact.
Page 12: in the text 41% of women reported having had more than one partner in
the previous 12 months but this adds to 40% in the table.
Page 20: “. . . importance of both parties viewing themselves as a committed
couple, . . .”
Page 25: “Women were depicted as having a critical role . . .”
Page 25: “Participant’s presented scripts . . .” (no apostrophe)
Discretionary Revisions
Page 5: suggest adding that HIV-prevention messages might have been deemed
irrelevant by this group of women as this ties into the comments made in the
abstract (and later) that women viewed HIV risk as being an issue for other
women, and not themselves.
Page 5: ‘ . . . perception among heterosexual men and women that HIV is not a
heterosexual issue.’ I suggest qualifying this statement with ‘in
Western/developed countries’ since HIV is very much a heterosexual issue in
India, Africa and other parts of the world.
Page 6: possibly add that the discussion of condoms is unnecessary and in
violation of sexual scripts for regular partners. I think that we have moved into an
era where condoms in casual relationships are viewed as acceptable and are
becoming more normative (at least in the countries where I have worked. This
might not be the case for the US).
Page 16: I found the disparity between women’s disappointment in men and
men’s intolerance of disappointment in women interesting. It would interesting to
see this explored further.
Page 25: discussion in the first paragraph. The question that I was left with when
reading this was, if women step up for so many of men’s inadequacies, why can’t
they do the same with condom use?
Page 26: I’m not sure that I agree that women’s relational schemas reduced their
perception of HIV risk. I think that in the balance of choice they choose to give
greater priority to the relationship than sexual health. It would be interesting to
unpack why this might be.
Page 28: I agree with the suggestions of the authors for HIV prevention
programmes but would be interested to hear how they believe it might be
possible to (a) get participants to be critically conscious enough to work through
a deconstructing/reconstructing process and (b) transfer this into their sexual
relationships.
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 declare that I have no competing interests