Does Group Size of Provision Matter for Children Who Experience Residential Group Care in Scotland?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a very interesting study that discusses the experience of youth who are veterans of governmental youth care services in Scotland. I enjoyed reading it, and believe it to be on a very important topic, but do have several suggestions for the author(s) as to how to improve the manuscript.  These are listed below.

1.       The author should describe what an “offense grounds” is for those not familiar with the term (line 36 of page 1)

2.       One Line 93 of page 2, the author jumps into talking about the third question of the PhD thesis without going into questions 1 and 2. I suggest that the author reframe not in the context of the PhD thesis except to say that the data come from the PhD thesis. The author may wish to consider changing the title (when I first read the title, I thought I would be reading about PhD students)! In the US it is usually called a dissertation, and it is not really typical to see this in the title of a study (although indeed it is important to note in the methods section).

3.       When discussing positionality, more information than the author(s)’ occupation should be discussed. Gender, age, race/ethnicity, and so on. Also, the author states that they have work experience in residential care, but they don’t discuss in what capacity. For example, it could be as a therapist or a nurse or an educator.  They note only that they are a practitioner-researcher. Please clarify.

4.       In the methods section, greater detail needs to be spent describing to readers exactly how data were collected. Where, what questions, how long did the interviews last, and so on.

5.       The results section would be substantially improved I think with subheadings – it can organize the findings and orient the readers in a more purposeful way.

6.       Please add a limitations section. In this section, please discuss some of the challenges with retrospective accounts. Also please discuss some ideas for future research.

7.       Minor points:

a.       After the first couple of paragraphs, the references are not in the proper format.

b.       First word of conclusions should be “although” not “while” – “while” should be reserved for time-based comparisons.

Author Response

Please see the attachment. I have triangulated feedback with the revised version but this only allows me to add one attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

A very interesting and significant approach that could be replicated in practice. However, a big part I dedicated to "what is residential care" should be mentioned and then argued in the context of trauma-informed work. 

sampling should be well described in terms of who and why this population and how this reflects your research question since there is significant variety in your sampling which can influence findings. Results are very descriptive and provide significant insight into the lives of children in residential care. It would be important to discuss them in light of the findings of other studies and to provide limitations of the study

Author Response

Please see the attachment. I have triangulated the attached with the revised manuscript but I am only able to upload one file here.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I enjoyed reading the revised manuscript. The authors were very receptive to the reviewer comments.

I suggest one more thorough proofread, and also as an edit please go through and change "data" to be a plural word (I saw the improper use one time, but there may have been other times).