Understanding Mental Wellbeing amongst Potentially Vulnerable Higher Education Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The text is well written. I have only 2 doubts.

The researchers should also take into account the positive aspects of the remote learning (especially for the groups with special educational needs). But it should be planned before the research

Second remark is connected with the understanding of wellbeing. I accept the fact that the most interesting is the mental dimension but it would be nice to write about physical dimension as well, because during pandemic it was very important.

For enriching and supporting your ideas I suggest to take inspiration from the works of Manfred Spitzer

as well as:

Ružić-Baf, M. ., Kadum, S., & Kvaranta, K. (2021). ONLINE TEACHING AND GRADING DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC – ATTITUDES OF CROATIAN STUDENTS . Journal of Education Culture and Society, 12(2), 399–411. https://doi.org/10.15503/jecs2021.2.399.411

Hasan, K. K., Mukherjee, D., & Saha, M. (2021). Learning Continuity during COVID-19 Pandemic using the Virtual Classroom – A Cross-border experimental Multi Case Approach. Journal of Education Culture and Society, 12(1), 335–354. https://doi.org/10.15503/jecs2021.1.335.345

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I enjoyed reading “Understanding mental wellbeing amongst potentially vulnerable higher education students during the COVID-19 pandemic.” This paper reports on focus groups of college students from Belgium, discussing reasons for reduced wellbeing during the early time of COVID.

 

I think the fundamental question for this paper is whether it makes a contribution to what is already known about the impact of COVID on higher education students. There are two difficulties for me in evaluating that contribution—one, my personal expertise is on k-12 education; and two, the paper has zero literature review.

 

Focusing on this second difficulty, I notice that the paper has some citations at the end but has no in-text citations at all. Does this journal not require in-text citations? The introduction moves very rapidly through a large number of topics, often with one sentence each on claims that could/should be entire paragraphs. The introduction does not situate the paper in the existing literature—the paper says “We add to the current literature,” but they have not described the current literature. I do not know what this journal’s policies are regarding literature reviews, but I think the paper needs a clear literature review and a clear statement of what this paper adds to the literature.

 

There is no conceptual framework offered, and neither is the interview protocol provided (which presumably would be aligned to some conceptual framework).

 

There is no research question(s) provided.

 

Other comments are relatively minor—I note that the demographics of the groups are overwhelmingly female, but I believe the existing literature suggests that females struggled more in terms of mental health during COVID. The imbalance in demographics should be discussed somewhere.

 

The focus groups were from a very specific time during the pandemic, a time which has long passed, so I think the paper should think more about what the implications are of the work beyond that specific time.

 

There are words throughout the results section like “most” or “a majority,” which imply that some quantification was done in the coding process. Is that correct? If so, the authors could say more about how they came up with those numbers, or perhaps even report counts in the text.  

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I think that by and large the revisions to the manuscript were well intentioned but fairly superficial. Thus, many of my comments remain unchanged.

 

1)    The opening section does include some citations now, but this section really does not go into much depth on existing literature. Thus, when the authors get to the point where they are stating their contribution, the reader cannot really see whether that contribution is real or not. I still think the review of literature needs to be more comprehensive.

2)    The authors added a sentence acknowledging the overrepresentation of female students, but they do not discuss the implications of that overrepresentation, if any. I think given known differences between females and males in mental health there are some implications that merit at least a sentence or two.

3)    I think the authors’ response to my comment about the timing of the data collection and the implications of the results for now is somewhat of a throwaway. For instance, we have no idea whether the issues raised in this article are lingering or whether they have gone away. The data was collected a couple years ago – are the findings even still relevant? I don’t disagree with any of the recommendations, to be clear,

4)    I really don’t think it’s appropriate to use words that imply quantification like “most” or “a majority” if no quantification was done.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf