A Systematic Scoping Review on Research Focusing on Professionals’ Attitudes toward School Attendance Problems

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for this interesting paper which explores in depth issues relating to SAPs. By conducting a SRL you have highlighted the limitations inherent in the extant literature in this area and raised  important questions of definition, clarity and context.

The paper is coherent in argument and clearly written. With the exception of a typo on line 19 of the abstract ( should be identifying rather than identify) and the misuse of the word latter ( which means the second of two options) on line 453 I recommend publication in the present form.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1. Please the the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The review “Professionals’ Attitudes toward School Attendance Problems: A Systematic Scoping Review" describes the characteristics, research design and terminology of existing studies on professionals’ attitudes towards school attendance problems.

The main problem of the review is that it does not describe the substantial results of the existing research (What are professionals’ attitudes towards SAPs?). The research questions that the paper answers are not making a relevant contribution to educational research if they are not related to the substantial results of the studies. Therefore, I cannot recommend this review for publication.

Other points

I recommend the authors to write a narrative synthesis of professionals’ attitudes towards SAPs using the papers that the authors have already collected. The paper already contains some interesting aspects that go into this direction, like “Moreover, much of the recent research on SAPs has switched from focusing solely on theories that attribute SAPs to individual reasons (e.g., clinical perspectives) to emphasizing theorization of contextual or ecological factors that may contribute to the development or maintenance of SAPs.”

Large parts of the text in section 3 are redundant, they only repeat the numbers shown in the corresponding tables or figures. I suggest summarizing the results in fewer tables and potentially combining section 3 and 4.

For the introduction it would be helpful if the authors would provide information on how frequent school absences are to give the readers an idea of how pressing the issue of increasing absence rates are, for instance, for England https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/pupil-absence-in-schools-in-england. Likewise, it would be helpful if the authors would provide information on the prevalence of the of the four different types of SAPs.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2. Please see the attachment.  

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript focuses on a description of the methodology of studies on professionals’ attitudes towards school attendance problems.

The ms. is nicely outlined and well argumented.

Based on the title (and abstract), I expected to read a review about professionals’ attitudes. However, the ms. did not focus on the content of the included studies at all, but was constricted to describing the methodology of the included studies. I suggest that the title (and the abstract) are re-phrased in order to better reflect the content of the text.

The methodology of the study is  appropriate for the purpose. However, health care professionals have likely been excluded from the results as a consequence of the choices made in the process: that is, pubmed or medline would be the databases including studies on doctors and nurses/school nurses, but these are not included. Is there a reason for this choice? 

In the Prisma diagram, the authors refer to “Lack of evidence (n = 10)”, what does it mean?

I find figure 3 redundant, as the same info is given in the text. Also, figure 4 could display number of studies per country too, in addition to percentage.

3.2. What is a view study? Google did not provide help.

As the aim of the study was not to cover views of parents and students, and the search criteria did not cover these either, it is a bit unclear why information on inclusion of parents and students on page 13 are provided, and what the utility of this information is. Also, in tables 3 and 4, the line with teacher occurs two times. I would suggest leaving out the information in this entire section. Or, as an option, to include in the discussion a section about differing views of different stakeholders (in addition to the mention in the conclusions).

Figure 6 outlines concepts per period of years. I like the idea, yet the table is hard to read, and it seems to be lacking the coloring information for some colors (on the row for truancy there is a block in grey and brown without explanation).

The information in table 5 is important, and I appreciate the idea. However, I would like the authors to open up for instance how truancy was operationalized- as it is evident that few researchers has used truancy in the same meaning as Heyne et al., in their 2019 paper proposed. Instead, I would assume that truancy has been used in many articles to mean absence in general or absenteeism. I note that the authors do in fact include a meritable section in the discussion about this problem (and other problems related to definitions). However, I wonder whether this could be accounted for in some way already in the results?

After reading the results I find myself wondering what the takeaway from the scoping review is. I would have been interested in reading about the attitudes of professionals, and I assume that the authors plan to publish these as a separate article. As such, I find most parts of this review well conducted, yet the output remains a bit narrow. Perhaps including both the actual findings about attitudes, and this more methodologically descriptive paper would be an option. I leave this decision to the editors though.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 3. Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I appreciate that the authors have clarified what the purpose of a systematic scoping review is and that they changed the title and abstract accordingly. I have to say that I was not aware that this kind of review exists. Nonetheless, I think that some of the conclusions of the authors require a discussion of the substantial results of the reviewed studies.

The authors conclude in section 4.2 that more experimental research is needed. However, it remains unclear what conditions should be manipulated in an experiment. It would be helpful if the authors could provide some guidance on which kinds of experiment would be most promising based on their review of the literature.

The authors call for more research that incorporates the perspectives of students, parents, and different professionals. I think this call requires another justification than simply that there have been few studies with different stakeholders. It would be helpful if the authors could show from previous research that these stakeholders have different attitudes.

Moreover, I appreciate that the authors have provided a table with the highlighted findings of the study. I suggest adding this information to Table 2.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2. Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf