Reviewer's report
Title:Awareness of Pap testing and factors associated with intention to undergo
Pap testing by level of sexual experience in unmarried university students in
Korea
Version:5Date:4 February 2014
Reviewer: Susanne Blödt
Reviewer's report:
Major Compulsory Revisions
1. Introduction: The research question is not precise enough and not well defined
which makes it difficult to judge whether the method is appropriate for
investigating the research question. Furthermore the results seem somehow not
properly linked to the research question, neither to the methods.
e.g. in the introduction the authors wrote “The purpose of this study was to
identify the level of awareness and attitudes towards Pap screening among
unmarried university students in Korea using the Theory of Planned Behavior,
which has been widely used in research into cervical cancer prevention
(introduction)” but in the methods the assessment tools and definition for level of
awareness and attitudes are missing. Furthermore no results for level of
awareness can be found in the results section. Instead the authors present the
difference in awareness of Pap test screening (having heard about Pap test
screening) between sexually experienced and inexperienced women. In contrast
to the introduction the authors mentioned in the abstract that “the study aimed to
compare the attitudes and beliefs of unmarried university students in Korea
using……”
Further research questions are mentioned such as “the relationships between
these feelings (stigma and shame) and the intention to undergo Pap testing were
evaluated in the present study. The role of socio-demographic factors based on
previous research findings were also examined in this study.”
The association between socio-demographic factors an what have been
investigated?
It remains unclear to me how exactly the theory of planned behavior is linked to
your research question.
2. Introduction: Could you explain the theory of planned behavior in the context of
your research? Which components does it include, why was it developed, what is
the main message of it?
3. Methods: Methods are cursory and scattered between Methods and Result
sections e.g table 2 and “485 female students completed the online survey….”
belongs to the the result section.
4. Methods: Subjects and data collection procedure: How did you select the 11
universities? Please give a short description of the selected universities. How
many unmarried and young women are studying at the national universities and
at the 11 you have selected? How many of the students were eligible for your
study? Without this data it is difficult to understand the results of the study. If
numbers are not available it should be mentioned in the discussion section.
5. Measure: How did you assess attitudes towards Pap testing? How did you
assess awareness? What socio-demographic data have been assessed? Is
“confidence regarding cervical cancer prevention” and “level of awareness”
another dependent variable?
6. Methods: Statistical analysis: The definition of your outcome variables should
be described e.g how did you define intention to undergo Pap test? For me it is
not clear how one factor of your TPB model became the outcome of the
regression model and the other factors in the TPB model became the
independent variables in your linear regression model. Have the authors used
multiple imputation for missing variables? If not can you specify how you have
dealt with missing variables?
7. Results: Table 4 and 5: The units are missing. Can you describe how the
results have to be interpreted ? What do higher values indicate e.g. behavioral
attitudes?
8. Results: Table 4. The comparability of the results among sexually and sexually
inexperienced women is questionable without using the same factors in both
models.
9. I suggest English review
Minor comments:
1. Did the information given to the participants before they completed the
questionnaire include references?
2. Grammar and spelling should be carefully checked.
3. I recommend being consistent with the expression of outcome variables and
factors e.g attitudes and opinion, awareness and level of awareness are used
interchangeable what makes it difficult to follow.
Level of interest: An article whose findings are important to those with closely
related research interests
Quality of written English: Not suitable for publication unless extensively edited
Statistical review: Yes, but I do not feel adequately qualified to assess the
statistics.
Declaration of competing interests:
I declare that I have no competing interests.