Energy Consumption of Retrofitting Existing Public Buildings in Malaysia under BIM Approach: Pilot Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The comments are present in the attached PDF file. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Reviewer One

SUMMARY: The study proposes a questionnaire-based survey to pre-determine the logic behind the questionnaire regarding the assessment of the present status of BIM retrofitting in buildings, and their energy consumption. The designed questionnaire consists of five parts totaling eighty-five (85) statements. The survey responses from ninety-seven (97) participants were recorded and a random sample of size thirty (30) were used for the analysis. The validation of the questions was performed through hypothesis testing and correlation analysis via the SPSS software. The study finds that the questionnaire elements are valid with a Cronbach factor higher than 0.6.

Please find the comments on each aspect below:

WRITING:

• The writing style needs improvement to be easily understood:

o Abstract:

 “Hence, the work on the broader scale of testing and analysis could have proceeded”? >> shouldn’t it be “… could proceed”?

Response: Corrected.

o Introduction:

 “The pilot study focuses…” >> “… This pilot study focuses”.

Response: Corrected.

 “Consequently, energy supply challenges, dwindling energy supplies, and substantial environmental repercussions - global warming, ozone depletion, and climate change ” >> The sentence doesn’t seem to be complete/correct.

Response: True. The new sentence is “Consequently, energy supply challenges, dwindling energy supplies, and substantial environmental repercussions influence global warming, ozone depletion, and climate change.”

Please paraphrase.

 “One of goals of researchers …” ?? “One of the goals of researchers … ”.

Response: Corrected.

 “… to retrofit government buildings are successfully and a shortage of studies on …” >> the sentence doesn’t seem correct, please paraphrase.

Response: Right. The fundamental prerequisites for successfully retrofitting government buildings are met, yet there is a scarcity of studies on BIM models for retrofitting in maintaining or improving government buildings in Malaysia.

o Literature review:

 “… could provide the followings:” >> should it be “… could provide the following:” or something similar?

Response: Corrected. The ‘s’ has been removed.

o Research Methodology:

 “This study used a 5-point Likert Scale to better communicate and measure the answers” >> The word better can be avoided unless there are comparands stated a priori.

Response: Agree. “Better” is removed.

 “Statistical Package for the Social Sciences software (SPSS Version 26) is used as a statistical software to analyse survey data” >> “… is the statistical software used to …”.

Response: Added.

o Methods of Assessment:

 “… respondents. Point of view.” >> The sentences need correction.

Response: Corrected.

o Ethical:

 Is this supposed to be a section name? Please reword it as ‘Data ethics’, etc as appropriate.

Response: Corrected.

 “…in my nation”, “Our country's…” >> Please avoid personal references in the interest of being scientifically objective and to cater to the international readership.

Response: All “my” “our” and other were removed.

 “…engineering. Brings new challenges.” >> The sentences need correction.

Response: Corrected.

 “…new technologies. Slowing civil engineering technology development.” >> The sentences need correction. In general, please proofread the manuscript and address concerns like those above.

Response: You are right. “Slowing civil engineering technology development” is removed.

CONTRIBUTIONS:

• What are the exact contributions of the work? The novelty needs to be highlighted explicitly – perhaps in a separate paragraph.

o Also, please include how the present work furthers the state of the art, and why would that be useful. It would be desirable for the reader to see these in one place.

Response: A paragraph titled Contributions has been added.  The new paragraph contains the fundamental contribution of the study to the environment by highlighting the importance of energy saving, primarily caused by the considerable sector of buildings.

TECHNICAL: There are several technical concerns that need to be addressed:

• Research Methodology:

o “In this research…”, “The pilot study in this research was done using the quantitative technique, and data was collected using a questionnaire.” >> What does this research refer to? It’s not clear.

Response: The word “research” is changed to “study”. 

o “This study aims to determine whether this research was driven…” >> Somehow the terminology relating to the study and the research seems confusing. The research activity usually refers to the study undertaken; the authors can clarify the terminology in the manuscript.

Response: Almost all the words of “research” were corrected throughout the manuscript.

o Table 1:

 Are these 18, 27, and 40 paragraphs since table 2 seems to refer to these as statements, instead? Similarly, the word paragraphs is used in Section 5.4.

Response: Despite the two words can be used interchangeably, in this paper the “statement” will be used”. 

o Testing Sample Size:

 “as in equation (2):” >> did you mean equation (2), instead, it’s not an in equation?

Response: Yes, it is Equation (2).

• Methods of assessment:

o Table 3 mentions that out of the 30 samples, 11 don’t have BIM training. How is it desirable to have their comments on topics pertaining to BIM-based methodologies unless it is to garner perception related to BIM?

Response: Those are engineers; however, they do not have training by intuitions that provide specific training.

o Section 5.2:

 The authors can mention how the standard sampling procedure was applied to the case at hand. Specifically, what does it mean for the model to be representative of the population in this context?

Response: As mentioned in the text that the sample of 30 respondents was randomly chosen from the number of respondents which was much bigger number. 

o Table 5:

 How is the total reliability measure (0.987) higher than those from the individual categories (0.942, 0.957, and 0.979)?

Response: This is true because as the number of statements increases, it is expected that the consistency or the reliability should be better. Please, refer to “Tavakol, M., & Dennick, R. (2011). Making sense of Cronbach's alpha. International journal of medical education, 2, 53.”

o Section 5.5.1:

 “… Pearson correlation coefficient between the scores of each of the four constructs and the total score for the construct to which the paragraph belongs…” >> What does this mean and how is this justified? Why would it matter which paragraph the construct belongs to? As commented previously, it’s not clear what the relation between a statement in the questionnaire and a paragraph is. Please disambiguate it.

Response: In this section, the statements of each dimension were correlated with the dimension itself using SPSS.  The same trend was done for other three dimensions. 

 “All correlation coefficients were calculated at a p of 5%” >> What does this mean?

Response: It means that the significance with two tails is at 5%. 

The p-value is used in significance testing whereas the correlation coefficient is understood as just a statistic if the test isn’t specified. Are you testing the magnitude of the correlation coefficient? What is the hypothesis being considered and the test statistic in regard to the two-tailed distribution? Please explain a priori the test procedure without any ambiguity.

Response: No, not at all. The test was about the correlation coefficient whether it is significantly accepted or not?

o Section 5.5:

 In general, please clarify the test procedure with reference to the test statistic, the null and the alternate hypothesis prior to discussing p-values.

Response: In this study, no hypotheses were tested. The purpose is only to validate the questionnaire using a small sample.

Overall, the writing and the presentation of the methodology need to be revisited and significantly improved with a focus on adequately describing the hypotheses tested and the inferences drawn thereof

Response: I absolutely agreed with you. The whole paper has been carefully reviewed.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article discusses the potentials of the building information modeling (BIM) approach for improving the energy performance of existing public buildings in Malaysia. Overall, the subject of research is interesting but improvements are necessary. In this regard, the authors should address the following comments:

1. From the Abstract alone it is not clear how the BIM approach for buildings retrofit is related to the questionnaire with 30 respondents? How did these respondents aided you in the understanding of the BIM approach?

2. Section 1 - Introduction could be shortened as it only gives a broad explanation of the BIM approach for buildings. The literature overview in section 2.1. is more focused, which is good. However, you should be able to explain how your research presents an advancement over international authors interested in building information modelling.

3. Malaysia introduced the Construction Industry Transformation Plan (CITP 2016-2020) which aimed to create sustainable construction industry and improve the life-cycle performance of buildings. Please comment on the outcomes of this Plan.

4. Check equation (2): if ? is 0.01 (*10%?*) and ? is 0.15 (15%), then ? is not 29. It should be n = ln(1-0.15)/ln(1-0.01) = 16.17

5. You have distributed the questionnaire among project managers, contractors, architects, consultants and site engineers. All these persons come from different educational and professional backgrounds. What makes you believe that the questionnaire results (30 respondents of which 19 with BIM training) can be considered representative for BIM status in Malaysia? What would be the reasoning to answer this question, beside statistical confirmation with Cronbach alpha reliability?

6. On page 20 you list 4 objectives of the interview but on page 6 you list only 3 key factors? The objectives should be the same to the key factors or not?

7. You questionnaire included 85 "sections", you also use names such as "paragraphs" in Table 1, "statements" in Table 2) - it is better to use one name only. How did you ensure that all the respondents understood correctly all the statements and not just quickly assigned a Likert value to the statements without catching their true meaning?

8. I suggest to add the 85 statements of the questionnaire in the Appendix. What are the average Likert scale values obtained for the 85 statements in the questionnaire, what is the spread on the Likert scale values?

9. The Conclusions should outline the limitations of the present study and suggest possibilities for future improvement in this regard.

10. Taking into account the obtained questionnaire results and the subsequent statistical analysis, what would be your guidelines for authorities and policy makers regarding the BIM approach in Malaysia?

11. Check the authors' statements on page 16 (institutional statement, informed consent statement, data availability).

Author Response

Reviewer Two

The article discusses the potentials of the building information modeling (BIM) approach for improving the energy performance of existing public buildings in Malaysia. Overall, the subject of research is interesting but improvements are necessary. In this regard, the authors should address the following comments:

1. From the Abstract alone it is not clear how the BIM approach for buildings retrofit is related to the questionnaire with 30 respondents? How did these respondents aided you in the understanding of the BIM approach?

Response: The questionnaire was built on the original four objectives of mu thesis whose title was “Evaluating BIM Implementation for Energy Consumption of Retrofitting Existing Public Buildings in Malaysia,” and whose objectives are:

RO1: To Investigate and examine the current energy status of BIM retrofitting in Public Buildings.

RO2: To determine and examine the strategies that will facilitate the analysis of energy consumption in existing public buildings.

RO3: To develop a framework for BIM retrofitting to optimize energy consumption in public buildings.          

RO4: To validate and verify the parameters of the proposed framework.

Moreover, the questionnaire was designed to satisfy these objectives. The original was sent to eleven reviewers, and nine responded with valuable comments. So, this is the story of the thesis and the questionnaire. The first two objectives, as seen above, were tested, where the central theme was energy consumption. I agree with you that the other two objectives were not discussed, nor were they a part of this study. This is probably, why you raised your first question. The 30 respondents were randomly chosen to be in this pilot study where the focus is energy consumption is the primary goal. To the best knowledge, the pilot study's purpose is to verify the questionnaire before indulging in a much wider analysis. I wish I have convince you.

2. Section 1 - Introduction could be shortened as it only gives a broad explanation of the BIM approach for buildings. The literature overview in section 2.1. is more focused, which is good. However, you should be able to explain how your research presents an advancement over international authors interested in building information modelling.

Response: Agree. I tried to shorten the introduction and focusing on Section 2.1.

3. Malaysia introduced the Construction Industry Transformation Plan (CITP 2016-2020) which aimed to create sustainable construction industry and improve the life-cycle performance of buildings. Please comment on the outcomes of this Plan.

Response: True and something important to include. The Malaysian government has issued a legislation under CITP 2016-2020 in which the government aimed to create sustainable construction industry and improve the life-cycle performance of buildings. The importance of this legislation can be seen in the following quotation “The construction industry is crucial to the Malaysian economy and its growth. The construction industry currently contributes 4 per cent to the Malaysian Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and is expected to contribute 5.5 per cent to the Malaysian GDP up to 2020.” (Malaysia, C. I. D. B. (2015). Construction Industry Transformation Programme 2016–2020’. CIDB: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)

4. Check equation (2): if ? is 0.01 (10%?) and ? is 0.15 (15%), then ? is not 29. It should be n = ln(1-0.15)/ln(1-0.01) = 16.17

Response: ? is 0.01 is corrected to 10% (0.10).

5. You have distributed the questionnaire among project managers, contractors, architects, consultants and site engineers. All these persons come from different educational and professional backgrounds. What makes you believe that the questionnaire results (30 respondents of which 19 with BIM training) can be considered representative for BIM status in Malaysia? What would be the reasoning to answer this question, beside statistical confirmation with Cronbach alpha reliability?

Response: Those are engineers; however, they do not have training by intuitions that provide specific training.

6. On page 20 you list 4 objectives of the interview but on page 6 you list only 3 key factors? The objectives should be the same to the key factors or not?

Response: To the best of my knowledge, there is no such a statement in the paper.

7. Your questionnaire included 85 "sections", you also use names such as "paragraphs" in Table 1, "statements" in Table 2) - it is better to use one name only. How did you ensure that all the respondents understood correctly all the statements and not just quickly assigned a Likert value to the statements without catching their true meaning?

Response: All terminologies are unified and clarified.

8. I suggest to add the 85 statements of the questionnaire in the Appendix. What are the average Likert scale values obtained for the 85 statements in the questionnaire, what is the spread on the Likert scale values?

Response: True. Included

9. The Conclusions should outline the limitations of the present study and suggest possibilities for future improvement in this regard.

Response: Added. The limitations of the research can be seen in collecting enough data within a short time because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The other limitation came from the nature of the research, as not many companies are involved in retrofitting.

10. Taking into account the obtained questionnaire results and the subsequent statistical analysis, what would be your guidelines for authorities and policy makers regarding the BIM approach in Malaysia?

Response: A paragraph under Contribution of the Studys has been added to clarify the importance of this study.

11. Check the authors' statements on page 16 (institutional statement, informed consent statement, data availability).

Response: Thanks, to be checked.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

the paper presents a feasible study for energy consumption of retrofitting for public buildings in Malaysia. The paper is useful and generally addresses an issue of high practical importance, however, some vague points have to be handled for the paper to be more readable and understandable. These weak points are: 

- Define all abbreviations in the paper (e.g. BIM).

- Rewrite the contribution in more details and clearly. The contribution of paper cannot be appreciated in the current situation of the paper. 

- Some energy consumption analysis methods that facilitate RQ2 on page.5 are not mentioned and not discussed in the literature. Please include the following articles in the literature and use them to answer RQ2, which are:

1-Al-Saadi SN (2021) Pragmatic retroftting strategies for improving thermal, energy, and economic performance of an institutional building in a cooling-dominated climate. J Build Eng 44:103326

2- Beggs C (2002) Energy management and conservation. Elsevier Ltd, Amsterdam

3- Mohamed, O., Fakhoury, S., Aldalou, G. et al. Energy Auditing and Conservation for Educational Buildings: a Case Study on Princess Sumaya University for Technology. Process Integr Optim Sustain (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41660-022-00273-z

4- Ascione F, Bianco N, De Masi RF, Mauro GM, Vanoli GP (2017) Energy retroft of educational buildings: transient energy simulations, model calibration and multi-objective optimization towards nearly zero energy performance. Energy Build 144:303–319

the aforementioned 4 references are closely related to your work and not included in the literature. Kindly, include them. 

- Some writing should be improved grammarly, read the paper at least two times before next submission fix the writing accordingly. For example, past tense is not used to describe the research findings and conclusions. 

- State more feasible future trends in the conclusion. 

Author Response

Reviewer Three

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

the paper presents a feasible study for energy consumption of retrofitting for public buildings in Malaysia. The paper is useful and generally addresses an issue of high practical importance, however, some vague points have to be handled for the paper to be more readable and understandable. These weak points are:

- Define all abbreviations in the paper (e.g. BIM).

Response: Done.

- Rewrite the contribution in more details and clearly. The contribution of paper cannot be appreciated in the current situation of the paper.

Response: Done

- Some energy consumption analysis methods that facilitate RQ2 on page 5 are not mentioned and not discussed in the literature. Please include the following articles in the literature and use them to answer RQ2, which are:

1-Al-Saadi SN (2021) Pragmatic retroftting strategies for improving thermal, energy, and economic performance of an institutional building in a cooling-dominated climate. J Build Eng 44:103326

2- Beggs C (2002) Energy management and conservation. Elsevier Ltd, Amsterdam

3- Mohamed, O., Fakhoury, S., Aldalou, G. et al. Energy Auditing and Conservation for Educational Buildings: a Case Study on Princess Sumaya University for Technology. Process Integr Optim Sustain (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41660-022-00273-z

4- Ascione F, Bianco N, De Masi RF, Mauro GM, Vanoli GP (2017) Energy retroft of educational buildings: transient energy simulations, model calibration and multi-objective optimization towards nearly zero energy performance. Energy Build 144:303–319

the aforementioned 4 references are closely related to your work and not included in the literature. Kindly, include them.

Response: All articles were added.

- Some writing should be improved Grammarly, read the paper at least two times before next submission fix the writing accordingly. For example, past tense is not used to describe the research findings and conclusions.

Response: Agree. The paper is checked.

- State more feasible future trends in the conclusion.

Response: Some future trends was added along with the contribution.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear authors, 

please see the attached review. Hope you will find it helpful. 

Kind regards, 

Reviewer

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Reviewer Four

Dear authors,

This article is focused on the actual and important issue concerned about BIM adoption, as well as awareness of its application within a different group of people. It is very valuable, that the published research is based on numerous surveys, nevertheless, as mentioned in the text, ‘Hence, the work on the broader scale testing and analysis could be proceeded’. Therefore, this work is rather initial research, or it should be significantly extended. I have got numerous comments which might improve your article. In order to be published, your work must be reevaluated once again, after your corrections. Even then, I cannot guarantee its acceptance, because its validity for the scientific community is questionable.

Response: Thanks for your words. I promise you that when you read the paper, you will more lenient towards the paper.

Here are my comments:

1. English quality needs to be improved: please re-edit the whole article

Response: Agree. The manuscript was edited.

2. There are multiple repetitions within the text (e.g. pages 7, 8, 11)

Response: All repetition was removed.

3. All abbreviations should be explained when introduced for the first time; later use the abbreviations.

Response: All abbreviations were checked.

4. The introduction is very general... it should be more comprehensive, highlighting the main challenges of the examined topic; additionally, the literature review is typically in the introduction; moreover, the introduction should be reorganized, e.g. the first paragraph should not open this work (better to use it later).

Response: A thorough revision of the introduction has been performed.

5. You said: ‘One of goals of researchers is to reduce carbon intensiveness to 4% by 2020 compared with 2005’; is it only 4%, and what does it mean ‘to reduce carbon intensiveness’? Additionally, you are referring to the past, so it was a goal in the past…

Response: Agree with you. However, the statement was taken from Kermanshahi, E. K. et al., 2020) which was written in 2020. Now, I tried to find a recent article talks about the same point; unfortunately, I could not find. So, I have two options: either to remove the statement or to keep it. If you instruct me to remove, I will. 

6. In chapter 1, add sections 1.1. Motivations and 1.2. Aims of the performed study (you should

state your theses here).

Response: In Section 1, both items were presented in that section but under no headline title. 

6. Chapter 2: Literature review, should be, in my opinion, in the introduction; additionally, section

Response: The format of the Journal seems to follow the writing.

2.1. about BIM is a low-quality review (there are various academic- and engineering-related aspects of BIM application which are not highlighted)

Response: Agree. The focus here is mainly about the energy consumption.

8. Chapters 3 and 4 should be rewritten as one; they can be retitled as Research Objectives and Methods Applied

Response: In the Journal format and other papers’ format, the two topics are presented separately.

9. There are many unclear thoughts within the text, e.g., what does it mean: ‘Energy Status of BIM Retrofitting in Public Buildings’?

Response: Probably the language is not clear enough. It might be better written to make better sense. Thanks. As mentioned earlier, the language of the whole article will be edited.

10. In Tab.1. use numbering to describe parts.

Response: Done.

1. Add spacing before and after tables for better readability

Response: Done

2. Phrase: ‘level of BIM awareness, and the training on BIM’ should be explained

Response: This phrase and others are parts of the Questionnaire which will be included in the appendix.

3. There are some phrases, which have no sense, e.g. ‘The Probability or representative sampling method was employed as the sampling method.’

Response: This is the technique that was used in distributing the questionnaire.

14. Section 5.3 is not needed; it is better to have only one section (5.2) with those results; similar comment for section 5.4

Response:

4. What is ‘Nalny scale’; an explanation is needed

Response: Nanly scale was found in 1967. See for example: “Laleh, M. M., Mohammadimehr, M., & Jame, S. Z. B. (2016). Designing a model for critical thinking development in AJA University of Medical Sciences. Journal of Advances in Medical Education & Professionalism, 4(4), 179.”

5. There is no ‘*’ symbol used in tables 6, 7, and 8, while it is described below each of them

Response: All symbols are in the Table above some numbers.

6. On page 12, you are probably referring to table 2, not 5 and 6…

Response: The statement is correct.

7. Chapter 6 is not needed in my opinion

Response: According to the “Pilot Studies”, there should a section for the Ethics. However, if the Journal decides otherwise, I will remove it.

8. Conclusions, as the whole article, are rather general and there is a lack of scientific quality

Response: The scientific quality is to validate the questionnaire that will be used later for the thesis.

9. I am not sure if the attached documents (appendixes) are needed

Response: I will check with the other reviewers.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The comments are attached.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Reviewer1. Round 2

Reviewer 1

The comments pertaining to the language, writing style, and contributions have been addressed. However, the crux of the paper relating to data analysis/testing still needs clarifications. The italicized text below shows the review comments (in black) and the corresponding responses (in red) received.

o Section 5.5.1:

 “… Pearson correlation coefficient between the scores of each of the four constructs and the total score for the construct to which the paragraph belongs…” >> What does this mean and how is this justified? Why would it matter which paragraph the construct belongs to? As commented previously, it’s not clear what the relation between a statement in the questionnaire and a paragraph is. Please disambiguate it.

• Response (Previous): In this section, the statements of each dimension were correlated with the dimension itself using SPSS. The same trend was done for other three dimensions.

Response (Current):

Pearson correlation coefficient between the scores of each of the four constructs and the total score for the construct to which the paragraph belongs…” >> What does this mean and how is this justified?

Firstly, as mentioned in the reference that was provided with these comments, (Casella, George, and Roger L. Berger. Statistical inference), the book dealt with the principle of hypothesis (Chapter 8). This paper has not yet considered the hypothesis approach which will be implemented later on as the author will discus the modeling. The purpose of the Pilot Study is mainly to show the validity of the questionnaire based on a random small number of the respondent. No model is implemented at this stage.  However, the Book reference will be included here for other valuable information therein.

The Pearson correlation coefficient (r) is the most common way of measuring a linear correlation. It is a number between –1 and 1 that measures the strength and direction of the relationship between two variables. For this reason, the correlation is needed between the constructs and between the constructs aa a whole and every construct.

As commented previously, it’s not clear what the relation between a statement in the questionnaire and a paragraph is. Please disambiguate it.

This part belongs to the association between the statement and the construct to show if the association is valid.

 “All correlation coefficients were calculated at a p of 5%” >> What does this mean? The p-value is used in significance testing whereaas the correlation coefficient is understood as just a statistic if the test isn’t specified. Are you testing the magnitude of the correlation coefficient? What is the hypothesis being considered and the test statistic in regard to the two-tailed distribution? Please explain apriori the test procedure without any ambiguity. 2

• Response: It means that the significance with two tails is at 5%. No, not at all. accepted or not?

Again, there is no hypothesis involved so far. In principle, when p > 0.05 is the probability that the correlation is true. Besides, (1-p) value is the probability that the correlation is not true.

o Section 5.5:

 In general, please clarify the test procedure with reference to the test statistic, the null and the alternate hypothesis prior to discussing p-values.

• Response: In this study, to validate the questionnaire using a small sample.

In the highlighted text above, there is contradictory information about the testing (for the significance of) the correlation coefficient while later mentioning no hypotheses were tested. If there are no hypotheses tested, the terms significance level (?), p-value (p), two-tailed tests, etc. would not make sense, let alone the conclusions drawn thereof. The authors must ensure that the hypotheses are clearly laid out prior to discussing statistical significance. Without this, the data analysis is incomplete. Please refer to [1] or [2] below for the conceptual framework pertaining to statistical testing.

Response: In this study, the authors have ONLY to test the correlation between the constructs of the questionnaire to make sure that the questionnaire is valid for the big data. The correlation coefficient tells us about the strength and direction of the linear relationship between x and y. However, the reliability of the linear model also depends on how many observed data points are in the sample. We need to look at both the value of the correlation coefficient and the sample size n, together. We perform a test of the "significance of the correlation coefficient" to decide whether the linear relationship in the sample data is strong enough to use to model the relationship in the population. The sample data are used to compute, the correlation coefficient for the sample. The sample correlation coefficient is our estimate of the unknown population correlation coefficient. If the test concludes that the correlation coefficient is significantly different from zero, we say that the correlation coefficient is "significant."

Correlation analysis in research is a statistical method used to measure the strength of the linear relationship between two variables and compute their association. Simply put - correlation analysis calculates the level of change in one variable due to the change in the other.

The strength of a correlation between quantitative variables is typically measured using a statistic called Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient (or Pearson’s r). Pearson’s r ranges from −1.00 (the strongest possible negative relationship) to +1.00 (the strongest possible positive relationship). A value of 0 means there is no relationship between the two variables. When Pearson’s r is 0, the points on a scatterplot form a shapeless “cloud.” As its value moves toward −1.00 or +1.00, the points come closer and closer to falling on a single straight line. Correlation coefficients near ±.10 are considered small, values near ± .30 are considered medium, and values near ±.50 are considered large. Notice that the sign of Pearson’s r is unrelated to its strength. Pearson’s r values of +.30 and −.30, for example, are equally strong; it is just that one represents a moderate positive relationship and the other a moderate negative relationship. With the exception of reliability coefficients, most correlations that we find in Psychology are small or moderate in size. The website http://rpsychologist.com/d3/correlation/, created by Kristoffer Magnusson, provides an excellent interactive visualization of correlations that permits you to adjust the strength and direction of a correlation while witnessing the corresponding changes to the scatterplot (Emmert-Streib, Frank, and Matthias Dehmer, 2019).

Conclusion: There is sufficient evidence to conclude that there is a significant linear relationship between x and y because the correlation coefficient is significantly different from zero. What the conclusion means: There is a significant linear relationship between x and y. We can use the regression line to model the linear relationship between x and y in the population.

The author added the second reference as a valuable one to the paper.

[1] Casella, George, and Roger L. Berger. Statistical inference. Cengage Learning, 2021.

[2] Emmert-Streib, Frank, and Matthias Dehmer. "Understanding statistical hypothesis testing: The logic of statistical inference." Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction 1.3 (2019): 945-962.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have responded to my comments and suggestions, and improved the article accordingly.

Author Response

Reviewer 2

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors have responded to my comments and suggestions and improved the article accordingly.

Response: Thanks

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

After revising the author reply and the changes in the revised manuscript, I have found that the authors have complied with all of my comments. Recommend to accept the article as is. 

Author Response

Reviewer 3. Round 2

Reviewer 3

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

After revising the author reply and the changes in the revised manuscript, I have found that the authors have complied with all of my comments. Recommend to accept the article as is.

Response: Thanks

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear Authors, 

Thank you for all your efforts regarding the improvement of your article. Also, thank you for all the implemented corrections. 

In my opinion, there is still room for improvement, nevertheless, I have decided to accept your work. It seems like valuable work for some groups of researchers, despite my privet concerns. 

Author Response

Reviewer 4. Round 2

Thank you for all your efforts regarding the improvement of your article. Also, thank you for all the implemented corrections.

In my opinion, there is still room for improvement, nevertheless, I have decided to accept your work. It seems like valuable work for some groups of researchers, despite my privet concerns.

Response: Thanks. Hope you will find this article very important when it will be published in its final stge.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx