PONE-D-20-36082

Silver linings of the COVID-19 lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Jenkins,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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This was an interesting reading. I also conducted a similar study in my country (still under review), so it was interesting to compare results. However, I agree with the Reviewers that modifications are needed. Especially: 

- this study has a strange sampling technique for a qualitative study. One would expect that a qualitative study of this kind would adopt saturation sampling, namely Researchers would collect data while performing first coding phases and stop when new themes cease to emerge. On the contrary it seems Authors here adopted a sampling typical of quantitative, questionnaire-based research. Why was it necessary to collect so many testimonies? Since so many data are available, and coding was performed on all of them, I would expect Authors to report descriptives/percentages of themes across the sample. In other words, since a notable sample is available, readers deserve to know how much a given theme was represented across the sample, which were prevalent or rare etc.

- for the same reason, and in accordance with Reviewers, more information and discussion could be added for table 1 information

- again in accordance with Reviewers, more example/excerpts could be added. To put it simply, I encourage Authors to make full use of the rich data they collected

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Please submit your revised manuscript by Feb 04 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

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Stefano Triberti, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: N/A

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Thanks for the opportunity to read your manuscript. Without disclosing my identity, I'm a New Zealand social scientist living abroad (narrows it down to hundreds of people!) and I appreciated the opportunity to engage with this research about how New Zealanders experienced the COVID-19 Level 4 period.

Overall, I believe this manuscript makes an important contribution. Given the ongoing public health issues in creating a social consensus behind social distancing until vaccine take-up, I hope this will be published.

However, there are a couple of areas that need a little revision.

1) You could make more of the gender findings. It's unclear if we can re-interpret the figures in Table 1 as odds of finding silver-linings or not, but if they can the chance of women finding silver linings are significantly greater than for men : 684/345 = 1.98 (women) compared to 487/415 (men).

This finding is broadly consistent with other research in sociology during the pandemic that there are significant differences in reactions by gender. See, for example, this article from Germany, for which the research was conducted around the same time as your work: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616696.2020.1808692

2) Related to this point, though less important, it might be useful to add a column to Table 1, displaying the composition of the New Zealand population for the same characteristics.

2a) In the panel for Ethnicity in Table 1, you might spell out New Zealand European.

3) Under Environmental Re-creation, I wonder if you might use some of the quotes that mention birds and bird song to illustrate this theme (by the way, thanks for providing the data, this was an enjoyable part of this review)

4) I think that the theme you identify of agency in the "lockdown" is important, and undercuts the terminology of lockdown. This, to me, is the international significance of this paper. Just the basic findings that 2/3 of people found benefits in the lockdown, and the articulation of people coming together for the public health intervention, is evidence that the intervention succeeded because people could see the benefits. Clearly there was some limited enforcement of the limitations imposed under Level 4, but in large part this was achieved because people voluntarily did it.

Around this point, you could cite and engage with the work on the leadership of Ardern.

McGuire, D., Cunningham, J. E., Reynolds, K., & Matthews-Smith, G. (2020). Beating the virus: an examination of the crisis communication approach taken by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern during the Covid-19 pandemic. Human resource development international, 23(4), 361-379.

Wilson, S. (2020). Pandemic leadership: Lessons from New Zealand’s approach to COVID-19. Leadership, 1742715020929151.

5) Once again, my thanks for providing the responses in a data repository. I think that it is important that before publication a wider range of quotes be used. Several quotes are used multiple to illustrate different themes. While quotes can clearly cross-cut themes, I think it would be stronger to have a range of different voices. The current situation suggests that there is not much depth to the responses, but the data doesn't bear this out: there are other quotes in the dataset that could replace duplicated quotes.

6) I hope that in the final dataset provided, you can include the thematic codes as well as the raw quotes.

Reviewer #2: This article presents a qualitative research on the benefits (silver linings) of COVID-19 lockdown in New Zealand, on

people’s life.

In general I think that the paper and in particular the object of study is weak; authors may refer to positive psychology, not only to the specific area of post-traumatic growth, to improve the conceptualization of silver linings, that is the foundational concept of the study yet is little clarified. This should reflect in more specific research objective and interpretation of data.

The authors should improve the introduction as well, especially enhancing references on the epidemic and psychology (an impressive number of studies were published in the last months, especially on journals such as Personality and Individual Differences, Frontiers in Psychology, and PLOS ONE as well. I believe citations to these works should outnumber older citations on other epidemics or disasters).

At the same time, I think that the concept of post-traumatic growth is not very deepened and could be improved.

Table 1 reports differences between participants who reported silver linings or not. Why are these differences relevant? This is not explored in discussion.

In methods, there is scarce explanation for the questions selected for the survey.

Sampling criteria are not specified, which is important since methodology (coding phases) seem to rule out saturation

According to methods, apparently just one researcher coded the responses, while the others worked on the already coded data. Is this common procedure? Wouldn't it be better to include more coders and report inter-rater agreement?

In my opinion, limitations and future research section could be stronger if authors would refer to other literature on psychological outcomes of the pandemic, and contribute to suggest the investigation of specific relevant psychological constructs and/or behaviors.

Finally, there are some typos in the manuscript. I suggest the authors to re-read the manuscript carefully.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Evan Roberts

Reviewer #2: No

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PONE-D-20-36082R1

Silver linings of the COVID-19 lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Jenkins,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

==============================

My apologies for the delay but I needed time to analyze the full manuscript and research again based on Authors' response. 

While the effort in responding to review concerns was appreciable, and Reviewers are satisfied with the changes, I am still not convinced about how the sampling and data reporting aspect is managed in the manuscript. Since data were collected by an online source, demographics were collected, and data were coded within a large quantitative study, it is not clear why Authors are not able to report basic information on prevalence and demographics associated with the emerged themes. Authors report (just) one study as example with a similar approach, ref. 30, which I am not sure could be considered comparable because it has a smaller sample and a more specific topic (switching from smoking to vaping...).

In any case, most of the manual or methodological sources on thematic analysis I have seen say that prevalence of themes across the sample is an important information to report. Otherwise, we as readers are left with the impression that some interesting themes were chosen arbitrarily to present but we have no information on their distribution, internal variety and quantitative significance. Results risk to appear merely anecdotal and we are not sure whether the same information could have been found interviewing 500, 100 or 10 participants only. 

If this is really impossible to do, Authors should at least: 

- include thorough discussion of sampling and data reporting and justify their approach with proper methodological references

- detail this issue more in limitations and implications for future research

Furthermore, I was not able to see the research data on the link Authors provided ("website could not be reached"). Please make sure that data are available for consultation according to PLOS ONE's policies

==============================

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 22 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Stefano Triberti, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I would encourage you to provide the file with thematic codings as well as the raw quotes as part of the replication dataset.

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Reviewer #1: No

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Silver linings of the COVID-19 lockdown in New Zealand

PONE-D-20-36082R2

Dear Dr. Jenkins,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Stefano Triberti, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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