Factors Associated with Concurrent Tobacco Smoking and Heavy Drinking within a Women Firefighters’ Sample

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 

This paper presents some results from a larger survey of firefighter women, and characterizes relationships between profession, smoking, drinking, and mental health risk. Overall, the data are interesting, but lack some context and the study population needs to be clearly defined—Who are ‘firefighters’? 

 

Minor comments below:

Introduction:

65- “fills the gap”- Should be “fills a gap” as the gap still exists.

 

Materials and Methods

82-83—the phrase ‘hidden population’ is misleading. Heckathorn (1997), among others, defines a hidden population as one where no sampling frame exists and public acknowledgement of membership is threatening

102-103: what is the ‘career fire service’? Needs defined.

103-104:  If you’re going to state that volunteers have less occupational health exposures, you need to back that up. My hypothesis would be lack of training and gear might actually make the opposite true.

113- Tobacco use is a misleading term. The authors neglected vaping and chewing tobacco use. The former is on the rise, and the latter is used in high frequency by male wildland firefighters.

120- The way this section is presented makes the measures unclear. If the alcohol use question was followed by the two drinks per day question, how did you measure the quantity of alcohol if it was a yes/no question that preceded it.  I realize that the CAGE was used, and that’s how the quantity estimates were derived, but the order of presentation of ideas makes it difficult to follow.

 

Results

205- what is a ‘rank’ of firefighters? Unclear.

237-238—The phrasing leads to a cause and effect assumption. Rephrase.

 

Conclusions

340- Overstatement?

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This research is about interpretation of factors associated with concurrent smoking and heavy drinking in women firefighters sample.

It is very interesting and important issues for women firefighters.

Here are some comment to improve the article.

 

1. “Please indicate the total number of samples in Table 1” 

2. Please check again the instruction for authors (Table, reference, interpretation of 1,000 or 1000 etc.)

3.Please add a discussion about the limitation of the small number of samples for some groups.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear. Author,

Thank you for your well amended manuscript.

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewer for their prompt review of the manuscript and their positive feedback. We are pleased to hear that our revisions have been well received and that the reviewer finds the manuscript to be improved.