The Relationship of Ambivalence towards Lecturers with University Students’ Psychological Distress and Mental Health

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to review this paper.

Introduction is very well presented, however from line 56 to 78, the text is not clear and difficult to understand. It would be appropriate to re-write these lines and making clearer the difference between objective or potential, and subjective or felt ambivalence. Perhaps, deciding one term, and not both could be a help. I mean use either objective vs subjective or potential vs felt.

Method

Study population needs to be explained, the universe and how the final sample of 1105 German students were selected, and again the process to select the “quota sampling”, and the date of the approval of the Ethic Commission.

Results

The interpretation of the correlations should be adjusted to the absolute number, and not only to the degree of significance, giving that the sample is bigger than 1000 subjects, correlations bigger than .3 are the ones relevant, as the lineal correlations analysis proved later.

The Table 3 can be presented in a better way, to facilitate its understanding (reduce size, present two decimals instead of three, for example).

Discussion

The discussion is fine, according to the questions and results. However, some advice related to teacher training are missing. If ambivalent teachers are related to student’s distress, measures to improve the ambivalence or copying strategies to deal with them are missing in the paper, and it would be very much appreciated.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The abstract should be in IMRD model. There is not clear information about the method (characteristic of the sample, analysis realized...), discussion.

The title and keywords should be clarified that the sample is configurated by university students.

INTRODUCTION: 

- The theoretical framework should be expanded; it is very brief. The authors should define Psychological distress, Mental well-being, Mental health (it is necessary to understand how is this variable measured), Paradoxical emotions (it is necessary to understand how is this variable measured), and Confounders. They are the variables which they are going to study.

- They should review the university studies about these themes/variables. 

- They should review the ways that exist to reduce the ambivalence or increase well-being. 

- The references must be updated. It could be interesting: 

*https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494424000847

*https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/28367138.2024.2373952?scroll=top&needAccess=true

*There are some studies about the importance of the self-compassion related with ambivalence, well-being and psychological distress. 

MATERIALS AND METHODS:

- The method is not defined.

- Study population:

*It is necessary to define the population to be studied. How many universities were involved? Which Degrees were studying the university students? In which courses were they? Age? Sex/Gender? Nationality?

*How were the study participants obtained? 

*Include a visual representation of the sample by means of a population pyramid.

- Instruments

*There are only two items for measure Subjective ambivalence, it is not enough. In consequence, there is not calculated the Cronbach's alpha.

*There is not explained how many items are for measure Psychological distress and how the items were assessed.

*There is not explained how the items for measure Mental well-being were assessed.

*Mental health and Paradoxical emotions are calculated using psychological distress and mental wellbeing scores. The reason of this question is not explained enough in the introduction section. 

*In the 149-151 lines instead of describing the measure, the authors gave results: "The resulting paradoxical emotions score indicates with rising values a strong psychological distress with simultaneous high level of mental well-150 being". This is not correct.

*As confounders variables they are age, gender, type of university, lifestyle... But in the sample is not information about that. 

- In the statistical analysis it should be interesting to include the results of the K-S tests.

- The procedure is not defined.

RESULTS:

- The description of the sample is presented as a result. This is not correct. This information should be in the Study population with a population pyramid.

- There is not a descriptive analysis about the variables. We do not know what is the objective ambivalence of the sample, neither the subjective ambivalence the psychological distress, or the mental well-being, or the mental health, or the paradoxical emotions. 

- In the 182-186 lines, when the Table 2 is explained, the authors should incorporate the "r" values in the text, as they do in the first sentence of this paragraph. 

- It is not analysed the impact of the gender in the ambivalence. There are some studies that analysed the gender and the health, showing the risk of females (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00737-020-01087-z). 

DISCUSSION: The discussion is very poor because the literature review is also very poor. It repeats what has already been said without contributing anything new. Both in terms of the theoretical framework and the data, which are presented again. There is a lack of depth, that is, there is a lack of interpretation of the explanatory model provided. This section in this type of study is what makes the article worthwhile or not. In this case, it merely repeats the results without making a significant contribution that would help to understand what happens to university students, what may be the cause, what needs to be considered, how it can be prevented or intervened, etc.

In the CONCLUSIONS the problem is the same.

The CITATION study should be changed to MDPI Style.

 

In SUMMARY, the study has options as the subject matter is interesting and novel, but for this it is necessary to incorporate new statistical analyses by reviewing the influence of gender for example, in the discussion to deepen the explanatory model offered, and to envisage both the implications of the results and possible avenues for action.  

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I think that the paper is improved, but I continue thinking that the background/introduction is poor, and that it should be explained in more detail the sample and the method. The lack of the gender analysis could be a limitation of the study, but the authors did not analyse it or evidence this lack. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf