Remote Working and Home Learning: How the Italian Academic Population Dealt with Changes Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown
, Giuseppina Dell’Aversana 3, Marco Fornili 4, Davide Petri 4, Laura Baglietto 4, Michela Baccini 5, Carmen Berrocal Montiel 6, Giuseppe Fiorentino 7, Gianluca Severi 5,8,9, Fulvio Ricceri 1,*, Maria Gabriella Campolo 10 and Andreina Bruno 11
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors,
I read your article. The research is relevant and current. The authors conducted a study on 5 universities in Italy and collected data from both students and academic workers. However, this article needs improvements, such as:
- the article does not have a literature review. This part, it must be written rigorously, adding citations from scientific articles that address this topic
- the article does not have research hypotheses
- the authors did not test research hypotheses
- the article has no conclusions, limits and future research directions.
In addition, the authors did not add a table with the structure of the analyzed sample, the introduction is written based on discussions without highlighting the novelty of the study.
The article needs major improvements.
I recommend you see the article from the following link https://0-www-mdpi-com.brum.beds.ac.uk/1660-4601/18/18/9665, maybe it will inspire you.
That's all!
After improving this article, I recommend sending it back for analysis!
Best wishes!
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
dear authors,
it is an interesting study, a good contribution to the international bibliography.
A suggestion, please take into your consideration earlier papers which were published at Sustainability, about the same topic (i.e. enrichment with references)
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
In this paper, the authors report the results of a huge study conducted in Italy across different cities for a total of more than 10000 participants. In the study, they show how some specific characteristics of the remote working condition can affect psychological distress. Overall, they find that working overload, concern for the future, and adequacy of the equipment are all important predictors of the psychological outcome during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study is impressive for the number of people involved. It is interesting and clear enough, but it should be improved in some aspects, as I will report here:
1) From a statistical point of view, I find unusual to take as reference point for the regression analysis the "less" or "worse" condition (I refer to the analysis presented in Table 3 and 4). I expected to see the middle point as reference, to give more clear and interpretable results.
2) In Table 4, the voice "Clarity of work objectives" and "Study-family conflicts" should be signed as significant. Moreover, study-family conflicts should be work-family conflicts.
3) The confounders were not reported, nor it was their actual effect on the outcomes.
4) Table 1 and 2 could be conveniently reduced, as no direct comparisons were conducted between distribution of scores in the different universities. Only the total could be reported, maybe as text more than a table. The detailed information could be moved in a supplementary table.
5) Following this point, the discussion part at row 314 should be removed as no statistical evidence of this effect was provided by the authors.
6) In general, the discussion is the weakest part of the paper. A more compelling comparison with previous work should be conducted for the variables of interest. Moreover, a limitations section is completely missing.
7) With such a large sample, more refined analyses could be conducted. For example, the manuscript can be enriched with the question relatively to family-work balance in women. Data exists that supports the idea that, during the pandemic, working mothers reported lower job satisfaction and productivity than fathers, as they were expected to devote more time to housework and childcare. Thus, it would be interesting to test this point by conducting a "sex x family-work balance" moderation effect. I would like a lot to see the results of this analysis, and this would also enrich the content of the paper.
See: Arntz, M., Ben Yahmed, S., & Berlingieri, F. (2020). Working from Home and COVID-19: The Chances and Risks for Gender Gaps. Intereconomics, 55(6), 381–386. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1007/s10272-020-0938-5.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors,
Thank you very much for the improved version of your article.
The article also needs to be supplemented in point 4 - Discussions and conclusions.
I suggest you make a separate section for discussions and a section for conclusions, research limits, the practical implications, future research directions.
Moreover, the authors, at the discussion section do not refer to all research hypotheses. There are no statistics to show whether the assumptions are accepted or not.
In addition, the authors did not add a table with the structure of the analyzed sample.
I suggest adding a table in this regard only with assumptions and related tests.
The article needs improvement according to the above recommendations!
Best wishes!
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors really improved the previous manuscript version. I appreciated the work they did both on methodological/statistical aspects and on writing. I have only a last suggestion, to further increase the clarity of the result presentation. I suggest presenting the regression results as a hierarchical regression. In the first step, the model will include only the confounders, in the second, both confounders and psycho-social variables, and in the third, only the moderation term gender*work-family load will be added. Therefore, the table will present the coefficients for confounders in step 1, for psycho-social variables only in step 2, and of the moderation effect in step 3. I would remove the model in which the variables are tested one by one, as it is less informative (and controlled) than the other.
Another thing about the regression model is that regressors should be mean-centered prior to conducting a moderation analysis. From the text, it seems that was not the case. This can alter the results and thus, eventually, the associated discussion. Please mean-centered the antecedents before including the moderation term in the third hierarchical step.
About the writing, I found a lot of typos and other languages problem in the text. As I am not an expert English reader, I suggest you go through a serious editing process of the manuscript.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors,
Given that your article has been improved, I recommend that it be published in the sustainability journal.
Best regards
Author Response
Thank you very much for helping us to improve our manuscript.
Best,
Fulvio Ricceri
