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Review 1 of "Doing death work: A mixed method examination of imprinted events and behavioral responses of medical examiner office staff"

Published onMay 24, 2022
Review 1 of "Doing death work: A mixed method examination of imprinted events and behavioral responses of medical examiner office staff"

Vote: Publish pending minor changes


[For votes to count, referees must reasonably explain why they voted as they did. Thus, please explain your vote. If you voted to publish pending minor changes, specify each change, why it is needed, and, possibly, how it should/could be done.]

The authors conducted interviews with 14 southern US medical examiner staff – former and current – asking open ended questions about their perceptions of and experiences on the job. They answer these questions using a variety of techniques. The paper is very well written, and the initial motives for conducting the study are well laid out and convincing. The paper is also versatile, including a comprehensive review of all previously published papers within the topic area, which are laid out in a detailed table.

The findings section is extremely long. I wonder if this paper might be broken up into two so that it focuses on only one or two key issues, or if the section could be better organized so that broader takeaways are presented rather than each individual point. I struggled to make sense of the main topics covered in this section.

The discussion section is significantly underdeveloped, particularly after such a long winded findings section that tackles a number of research questions. The section as written simply repeats the findings in a single paragraph and the reader is left to wonder what the implications of the study are. Why are the findings important? How might this information be used?

Thank you for the opportunity to review the paper. I thought it was very interesting and easy to read.

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