Group Membership and Social and Personal Identities as Psychosocial Coping Resources to Psychological Consequences of the COVID-19 Confinement

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Changes you made according to my comments are satisfactory and improved the clarity of the manuscript. Therefore, I do not require any further modifications. Well done!

Reviewer 2 Report

Nice work in addressing the issues raised especially clarification of the theoretical models, use of social identity theory and presentation of results.

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.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The research rationale and the study' scope is valuable and very interesting. Researchers collected a large enough sample in a very short time, during the harshest phase of the lockdown.

However, data analysis and result presentation require major changes.

Paragraph 3.1 presents comparisons for each combination of sociodemographic variable and "outcome" variables (social support, depression, etc...). This part is not coherent with the study's aims, and makes the manuscript a little bit hard to read. Authors should consider if eliminate this comparisons to make the manuscript more readable

I suggest two possible kind of analysis to perform to bring more focus on social support, coherently with study's aim.

1) Clustering sample in terms of "low/high" or "low-average-high" social support, and providing descriptive statistics and comparisons in sociodemographics and outcome measures for each cluster.

2) Modeling a path model using the variables from the correlation table. This analysis would test possible causal relationship between variables.

3) Running a MANOVA using anxiety, depression and resilience as dependent variables and sociodemographics, community membership and social support variables as independent/explanatory variables. 

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper states that the focus is on group membership and identity as impacting coping responses to COVID-19 related confinement and isolation.  given the importance of this topic, the stated purpose is appropriate for IJEFPH.  However, there are a number of issues with the manuscript that do not make it suitable for publication in the current form.

The conceptual framework needs a great deal of clarification.  The author(s) use group membership, social identity and high quality social relationships interchangeably and they are very distinct constructs.  High quality relationships can take place without social identification or group membership.  Group membership make be present without social identification.  Also, social inclusion does not necessarily mean social identity as in the SIT Tajfel meaning.  This means that when the model is introduced on page 4 - it does not follow clearly from the review of the literature within the introduction.  In fact, the model contains several variables not discussed and/or measured in the current research without explanation or clarification.

Given that the model exists and includes additional variables that are not measured in the current study, the contribution of the current research is very unclear.  What gaps are being address by the current research and its design that we don't already know from substantial previous research.

The authors also use several terms interchangeably that are not really measured in the study such as shared social identities, social support exchanges and reciprocal support (which if the latter was measured would be an interesting contribution if the results were significant).

The presentation of results is extremely confusing and needs to be better organized for the reader.  It would make sense to review tests of specific hypotheses earlier in the introductoon.  Also, the significant amount of attention to the various age groups is very confusion given that age is not a key variable for the various hypotheses being tested. I would suggest better use of summary tables for those findings that are not central to the key hypotheses being tested.  In addition, the model is presented, but there is not overall test of any model making the repeated results of correlations and one-way relationships very limited. 

The overall contribution of the paper is limited by the lack of clarity of unique result findings.  In addition, the sample is skewed in terms of gender (69% female) which suggests a missed opportunity to look at gender differences in social support and coping?  Also, some acknowledgement of the limitation of the number of measured administered with a somewhat small sample of 421 respondents.