The Mediating Role of Rumination in the Relationship between Loneliness and Depression in University Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The aim of this article is to investigate the relationships between loneliness, rumination and depression, and to propose a mediation model in which loneliness would serve as a predictor, rumination as a mediator and depression as an outcome. This article is timely and well written. I would have a few minor comments which are described below.
1/The purpose of the study should be the last sentence of the "Introduction" section following the statement of your working hypothesis. 
2/ Lines 124 to 133: I suggest naming this paragraph "study design" as a sub-section of the "method" chapter.
3/ It would be interesting to have a table showing the results of the exploratory analysis

Author Response

Please see the attachment, thank you!

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper aims to analyze the mediation effect of rumination in the relationship between loneliness and derepression. The authors collect self-report questionnaires from university students. Analysis shows that rumination partially mediated the relationship between loneliness and depression.

The authors propose hypotheses based on a theoretical framework. The details about the study are introduced, including the questionnaires used. The authors conduct statistical analysis for the hypotheses and discuss the effects of the covariates. I do not find flaws in the study. 

The discussion in this paper is complete. The authors link the findings to the theoretical framework. The authors also discussed the study's limitations, including lack of longitudinal data, the generalizability of the results, and the usage of self-report questionnaires. 

Although the findings in the paper are interesting and support the existing theoretical framework, I am not very sure about the motivation of the study. The study was conducted in the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it looks like the analysis does not consider the unique characteristics during the pandemic. Therefore, it is not clear what motivates the authors to conduct the study during the pandemic. Do the authors expect that the COVID-19 pandemic impacts the mediation analysis of rumination?  For example, is it possible that the sickness of the participants or their family is a common cause of loneliness, depression, and rumination? 

The authors exclude the participants who did not follow online education. What is the reason for that? In Table 1, there is still an online education category called "other." What does it mean?

Author Response

Please see the attachment, thank you!

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

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.