Reframing a Political Trust Study for a Scopus Q2 Journal

The paper was narrowed to the relationship between self-reported misinformation exposure and institutional political trust among young adult voters in one defined setting, separating correlation from causation, distinguishing trust from voting intention and positioning interviews as contextual explanation rather than proof of population-wide behaviour.

Misinformation exposure, institutional trust, political efficacy and partisan identification were separated using theory-aligned measures, while recruitment channels, eligibility criteria and demographic imbalance were documented and claims were limited beyond the achieved sample.

Question wording, scale reliability, missing responses and the order effects that could influence politically sensitive answers were reviewed, and a prespecified regression sequence reported uncertainty and checked multicollinearity without presenting association as causal impact.

A transparent coding framework retained contradictory accounts and linked themes to anonymised evidence rather than selective quotations, so interview findings illuminated mechanisms perceived by participants instead of statistically validating the survey.

The manuscript was reorganised so that theory and measurement led the Results. The researcher learned to report subgroup patterns cautiously, avoid labelling respondents as misinformed and explain how media habits, political interest and partisan identity could shape both exposure reports and trust.

Potential journals were compared for political communication and political behaviour scope, mixed-methods openness, regional relevance, readership and publication cost, with Scopus coverage and quartile checked at selection. For the major revision, the conceptual framework was rewritten, robustness models added, the methods section expanded with recruitment, consent, anonymisation, coding and reflexivity details, and a response matrix prepared connecting every reviewer concern to revised material.