Navigating Fragmented Infrastructures of Care: Children’s Sense of Home in Residential Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

I appreciated read your work, however please find a couple of comments for you consider improving your manuscript.

- please add missing sources in the introduction part (e.g., line 22-36).

-  a characterization of the context is relevant to understand the results, present facts and figures about residential education in Latvia.

- line 104 "called" is repeated. 

- abbreviated term "USSR" must be written in full before.

- methodology should be presented more clearly, namely about sampling and the selection process; adding a complete resume of the participants sociodemographic description; examples of the script's questions; data gathering (period of time, length, and so on); analysis's method.  

- to improve results presentation, I suggest adding a paragraph highlighting the main ideas/subheadings before findings.

- results must be based on empirical data instead of present other class of sources. Eliminate it, please.

- thus, discussion must provide literature in a dialog between your findings and literature, identifying similarities and the news that your study is providing to the academy/science. 

Best regards.

Author Response

- please add missing sources in the introduction part (e.g., line 22-36). - revised text throughout to check for missing sources.

-  a characterization of the context is relevant to understand the results, present facts and figures about residential education in Latvia. - additional contextual information added.

- line 104 "called" is repeated. - deleted.

- abbreviated term "USSR" must be written in full before. - full term added.

- methodology should be presented more clearly, namely about sampling and the selection process; adding a complete resume of the participants sociodemographic description; examples of the script's questions; data gathering (period of time, length, and so on); analysis's method.  -additional information added about sampling, sociodemographic information, data gathering and method of analysis.

- to improve results presentation, I suggest adding a paragraph highlighting the main ideas/subheadings before findings. - expanded the concluding sentences of each section where necessary.

- results must be based on empirical data instead of present other class of sources. Eliminate it, please. - we have eliminated the reference to other sources where it was irrelevant, moved other sources to other sections if necessary.

- thus, discussion must provide literature in a dialog between your findings and literature, identifying similarities and the news that your study is providing to the academy/science.  - added text about this point.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

First of all, I would like to congratulate the initiative and the interest in this topic. The life situations of people living in foster homes should be the subject of investigation due to the dangers and possibilities that this time brings to the lives of children and young people.

The study presents clear and coherent literature with the research and talks about the meanings of home, I believe it would benefit from being better explored. The methodology states that this article arises from a doctoral project. Identify data collection and analysis techniques and characterize your research subjects in a clear and timely manner. I enjoyed reading people's speeches, but I believe that the text does not benefit from having results and discussion in different parts. In investigations of this nature, discussing the data helps to bring more meaning to them. In the conclusions, it seems to me that you try to answer your starting question, but I feel that the number of subjects is not significant. Although they spoke in the 11 interviews carried out, I did not identify them in the document. I believe that its inclusion would help to bring greater robustness to the text.

I hope you find the comments useful.

Good Luck,

Author Response

• The methodology states that this article arises from a doctoral project. Identify data collection and analysis techniques and characterize your research subjects in a clear and timely manner. – added additional information about the data collection and analysis as well as included additional information about research subjects.
  
• I enjoyed reading people's speeches, but I believe that the text does not benefit from having results and discussion in different parts. – we chose to maintain the existing structure which we believe serves to better represent our perspective on the research field. While we agree with the comments of the review that there may be different ways of data presentation, for us this separation is necessary in the light of the first author's involvement with the research field. The separation is employed here to achieve greater degree of objectivity for the authors.
  
• In the conclusions, it seems to me that you try to answer your starting question, but I feel that the number of subjects is not significant. Although they spoke in the 11 interviews carried out, I did not identify them in the document. I believe that its inclusion would help to bring greater robustness to the text. – although most of the interview data from sources other than the three core participants is indeed less visible in the form of direct interview fragments, their analysis was necessary part to provide the contextual information that is described within the article. We have not included more direct fragments from these interviews (aside from the one with the principal, line 339-344) in order to maintain the focus on those voices within the research field that are often left unheard.