Review of 'Reflections, Resilience, and Recovery: A qualitative study of the COVID-19 impact on an international general population’s mental health and priorities for support'

This is an important topic. As the authors set out, there has been considerable work on responses to Covid, but less attention from a qualitative angle to the differences in experience and their implications both on an individual and sociocultural level. This paper therefore is both relevant and timely. 

It is a well-written description of a largely well-designed study. However, I do have a few specific comments:

1. I am not sure that the results and discussion fully deliver on the intial promise of consideration of inequalities in experience of the pandemic. If they do, then it is only on quite a general level (some people fared better than others). Given the demographic information that was collected and the cross-cultural approach, I would like to see a more comprehensive consideration of the similarities and differences across groups. 

2. The questions that were asked in the data collection were perhaps a little leading, and so in many ways I'm not particularly surprised that the results have grouped around the themes that they have - they do seem to map onto what was being probed. I think the presentation of one of the results as 'surprising' adds a bit to this sense of finding what was expected, which is a bit of a concern. Of course some results will be expected, but local surprise would usually be seen as one of the quality indicators of qualitative research, and a way of us ensuring that we can have confidence in what is being expressed.

3. Although a qualitative research project, the appproach to analysis of the data is fairly quantitative. There is no particular problem with this more structured quantitative analysis, but it does tend to result in a fairly small number of codes (which is of course often preferable when relying on inter-rater reliability) but there is perhaps a lack of richness to parts of the analysis, especially since we are told that many participants used the survey as an opportunity to write quite extensively about their experiences.