Title: Prevalence and factors associated with condom use among sexually active young women
in Haiti: Evidence from the 2016/17 Haiti Demographic and Health Survey
Version: 0 Date: 04 Feb 2023
Reviewer:  Adrien Joseph Emmanuel Demes
Reviewer's report:
Reviewer Recommendation and Comments for Manuscript: Condom Use_draf_26_09-
BMC_WH
Reviewer:
LAST NAME: DEMES
FIRST NAME: JOSEPH ADRIEN EMMANUEL
Title:
Prevalence and factors associated with condom use among sexually young women active in
Haiti: Evidence from the 2016/17 Haiti Demographic and Health Survey
Major comments:
The authors should be commended for focusing on a topic that is understudied in the context
of Haiti: analysis of the prevalence and the factors associated with condom use among sexually
active young women in Haiti
Is there any theoretical model that could guide the interpretation of the results? That could be
interesting in the introduction section and the literature review to present a theoretical model.
The theorical model could be relevant to help identify the variables and the confounding factors.
The author needs to explain more how the sample size was determined and the rationale. What
considerations determine the size of the sample.
It could be interesting to explain the inclusion and exclusion criteria used.
Is there an estimate of variation withing each group, and is the variance similar between groups?
How the social determinants of health play a role? Are there some areas with poor quintile
groups versus rich quintile groups? And how that play a role in the analysis? How the analysis
considers the social disparities and inequalities and what were the findings?
Is there any major bias that could influence the direction of the results? How the research team
manage to deal with the bias, for example selection bias, bias due to the design, instrumentation,
or other type of bias during analysis. How do you control for bias? Have you considered the
confounding factors? How do you control for confounding variables.
In page 10 (Result Section), it’s written: “All the young women interviewed declared having
knowledge of modern contraceptive methods, while less than 30% (27.2%) of them had correct
knowledge of the ovulatory cycle.”. It could be interesting to stress the population concerned:
is it among urban population or rural population? Is it among the rich or the poor? Is it among
the literate or illiterate?
If I understand the data was not primarily collected by the research team but they use secondary
data, the (2016/17 HDHS) data. Now, it could be interesting to have a paragraph on the quality of
the secondary data analysed. We know there were some securities and political, economic, and
social instability in Haiti: how that security situation and Haiti fragile state and violent context
had influenced the quality of the data collected. Or was there no influence of the context on the
quality of the data. Was there any Data Quality Audit performed?
It could be interesting to stress the challenges face by the research team while using the secondary
data and how that limit their study? How they evaluate the relevance of the secondary data set
regarding their research topic and questions? How the secondary data set influence their research
variables and how that influence their research questions, and research design?
Minor Comments:
The author could explain the rationale to use the following methodology for this specific data
set (HDHS): descriptive statistics and a binary logistic regression.
On page 7, it’s written: “Thereafter, bivariate analysis was employed to analyse the prevalence
of condom use by socio-demographic characteristics.” Because it’s bivariate, it is necessary to
stress the limitation of bivariate analysis in this precise case and data set.
Decision:
The paper is OK for publication after revision by the author.