Is Population Growth an Environmental Problem? Teachers’ Perceptions and Attitudes towards Including It in Their Teaching
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Accept in present form.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Once again we thank you for your time and effort in reviewing our manuscript. we deleted all the text that is highlighted in green. We also rechecked our language editing. We believe that the current version of the manuscript is suitable for publication.
Sincerely yours,
Iris Alkaher & Nurit Carmi
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for making a serious effort to address my earlier comments and those of the other reviewer.
I think you managed to answer to most of my earlier comments; some of my earlier concerns may remain because of the limitations to your methodology and data set. But in the revised version you acknowledge those limitations sufficiently; and of course I understand that your data gathering and analysis has already been completed (no new respondents and/or additional research methods can be added anymore). It does indeed help though that you made clearer that the survey consisted of two parts, so there were more relevant questions than only the 5 questions in the first part, and the answers to the second part of the survey are indeed quite in line with the answers to the first part.
Regarding your 'framing' of the population growth as an environmental problem, I appreciate that you now also acknowledge the critiques on Malthusianism and neo-Malthusianism in your introduction and discussion / conclusions.
So I guess the revised manuscript version is acceptable for publication, even though we may still 'agree to disagree' on some points.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Once again we thank you for your time and effort in reviewing our manuscript. we deleted all the text that is highlighted in green. We also rechecked our language editing. We believe that the current version of the manuscript is suitable for publication.
Sincerely yours,
Iris Alkaher & Nurit Carmi
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
1. Importance of the study.
It is scarce and focuses in a specific context, with important limitations.
2. Theoretical frame and references.
In general, the authors develop a concise review of the studies on this subject. However, the reasons could improve establishing a relation with the area of education, specifically with the current tendencies in environmental education to sustainable attitudes, since it treats of an intervention with profesorado and also with the Sustainability, and are necessary the pertinent references. It exists an extensive literature on the subject in this and other journal.
As it can affirm that it is wide the agreement between scientists on that “the growth….It plays an important factor in the damage caused to the resources”, there are authors very notable, amongst other, as Diamond (Diamond, 2006) that question it, that is to say any problem is the most important that others, is necessary to act on the group of factors that are interconnected.
In addition to the appearances socioculturales and religious it is necessary to take into account the dominant socioeconomic model in the actuality that prevails the consumption in the countries “developed”, and the consequences suffer them other countries.
It is necessary clarificar the objetivo and the questions of investigation in the corresponding place. Continúa with another subapartado of fundamentación where mixes affirmations on the emigration that do not correspond with the problem object of study.
3. Methodology and Results
Regarding the questions of the interview semiestructurada to 8 professors and the questionnaire, is not suficientemente clear the criteria that used and how evaluated his feasibility.
The interviews by email guarantee sufficient validity?
The answers were the expected, there are not new contributions. The results obtained can be skewed by the social suitability, since involucra to people that are had to do it.
It would have to explicitarse a section with the most notable conclusions in function of the aim posed, as well as the limitations of the study, and avoid unjustified affirmations.
Reviewer 2 Report
The question you are raising is an interesting and relevant one. I am disappointed though about the way you want to answer it. Unfortunately I don't think the paper is (close to) publishable in its current form; it would still need a lot of work to make it publishable.
Your perspective is too limited and too one-sided I think. It even looks like you already answered your question before starting your data gathering and analysis? Your paper reads as if you wanted to confirm your own view (that population growth is an environmental problem), it seems to exclude the possibility of other answers to your question?
From the very start (first sentence Abstract and first sentence Introduction) you suggest that population growth is an environmental problem and that there would be consensus about this? But you only present one side of the academic debate: the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian perspective. There has definitely also been a lot of critique on this perspective, but you do not refer to it?
Moreover, your data are too limited to draw such firm conclusions as you are drawing. A response of 200 on your survey is not bad, but the survey was extremely short, only 5 questions? The added 8 interviews, of which you suggest that they 'properly represent the whole sample' (p. 6), can of course not be considered 'representative' (8 out of 200 is far from representative?). You also do not tell us anything about your non-response: were there any reasons given for not participating in the survey, and which similarities and/or differences were there between respondents and non-respondents? Without this we do not know much about how representative your survey sample is?
Despite these limitations, there are a lot of firm statements and conclusions throughout your analysis and conclusions that may lack a sound basis. Moreover, there are several suggestive interpretations of your results, e.g. implying that 'E-teachers' are better informed about the environmental impacts of population growth than 'non-E-teachers' and therefore would consider it more as an environmental problem? I don't think you can really prove this?
I also think that you are not sufficiently targeting an international readers audience; your paper (especially the recommendations at the end) are mostly aimed at Israeli readers, but this is a journal for an international audience.
