Valuing Blue Spaces for Health and Wellbeing from the Community Perspective

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This article presents the results of a novel and robustly conducted mixed-methods study to explore barriers and facilitators to the use of canal-side paths for physical activity and wellbeing. It contributes to an important literature analysing the use of green and blue spaces which have the potential to contribute positively to community health and wellbeing, but are in many cases underused.

Overall this study has been conducted robustly and the inclusion of both quantitative and qualitative analysis results in an article which provides a comprehensive analysis of the evidence. The article is also clearly written, sets itself well in the current literature on the topic and makes a novel contribution to this literature.

There are only a few minor comments that the authors may consider before this article is published, as follows:

1. Page 3, line 105-6 "Participant information Sheet" - such a minor thing, but be consistent with capitalisation.

2. Page 8, lines 239-240 - the formatting isn't quite right here, looks like an a new paragraph is started by mistake.

3. Table 2: in barriers column "lack of safety features -risk assessment of towpath?" It's not clear why there is a question mark here.

4. Table 3 - This table is a repetition of what is already presented in Table 2. Perhaps the formatting in Table 2 could be revised slightly to highlight to the ranking (and therefore the top 3) without having to have a seperate table. This is a presentation preference comment so I acknowledge this is my opinion and may be at odds with the authors. The same is true for Table 5 which seems to be a repeat of some information in Table 4.

5. Page 13, lines 306-307 - there is a formatting issue again here with a new paragraph started part way through a sentence.

6. page 14, line 335: "Together the most important enabling and discouraging..." Does this mean when you consider the results from the 2 groups together? If so how was combined importance determined?

7. Page 14, line 376 "Factors influencing canal use were ranked based on the total sum of the participant votes" - was any weighting given to the voting as a result of the different size of the groups? From what I understand, each group only voted on the ideas generated within that group, and each group had different numbers of people so the total votes an idea got could be influenced by 1) the number of ideas generated within the group & 2) how many people were in the group who had votes to distribute among the ideas. I think this could be explained more clearly & if no weighting was used this should be explained with justification and consideration of the potential limitations it might cause. 

I very much enjoyed reading this article and would like to recommend it for publication following the very minor revisions which may be required in response to the comments above.

Author Response

Please see attached document.  

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In the manuscript titled Valuing blue spaces for health and wellbeing from the community perspective, Nafsika Afentou, Louise Jackson, Luiz Flavio Andrade, Stephanie Elliott, Katrina Hull, Jenny Shepherd, Emma Frew evaluated the overall value of blue spaces for human health and wellbeing by investigating the multifaceted wellbeing of local communities in Birmingham. This study contains some interesting findings with some cumulative implications for investing in future blue space development.

 

The essay provides new information and ideas about the topic. The authors have read the literature related to the issues they discuss, but they have not adequately articulated the value of their ideas. During the discussion, the answers to the research questions were not well explained, and although the discourse on related topics was summarised, there was a lack of summative evaluation. The authors used the questionnaire as the basis of their research to develop an assessment of the impact of blue spaces on people's physical and mental health and well-being, however, the authors could have provided more specific guidance on the characteristics of blue space landscapes and the context of landscaping with a territorial dimension in order to increase the practicality of the experiment.

Author Response

Please see attached document

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

First, I congratulate the authors for conducting this novel research, which undoubtedly add knowledge to the existing body of literature on blue and green spaces on population health and wellbeing. The aim of this research was to explore the social value communities place on blue environments, specifically canals, by identifying enablers and barriers to their use for physical activity. Th authors used nominal group technique for collecting required data on enabling and discouraging factors that influence their use of local canals.

The authors have conceived and executed the research strictly as per the guidelines to be followed in conducting a nominal group technique. The methodology has been perfectly designed and the process followed for collecting data has been adequately presented.

The results of the data analysis have been found adequate, and the way inferences drawn from the analysis is commendable. The tables and diagrams are used properly for presenting the results. Discussion section has been presented adequately with already available literature. Conclusion has been drawn from the study results and discussion.

The following are my minor comments:

1.    Time period of conducting this research is not provided in the methodology.

2.    The reasons for over representation of females, especially in the second workshop (or) underrepresentation of males may be explained in the methodology. (although the authors have mentioned this in limitations section).

 

 

 

Author Response

Please see attached document

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf