Review 2 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.]

This is a valuable and interesting paper that describes stress exposures and coping experiences of medical examiner personnel in detail. The qualitative interviewing yields valuable data and the linguistic analyses are innovative. The paper as a whole presents a new way of exploring the lived experiences of medical examiners.

However, I have some concerns. The literature review could be improved. The initial table is confusing. The final column of Table 1 simply lists topics. This is not as helpful as it could be. One possible suggestion is to organize the information using the 10 different behavioral strategies the authors list or to organize the information according to the authors organizational framework.

 The paper is very long. Some of the details on the linguistic coding could be eliminated. The table does not add much information that is useful. I think the summary of the findings is sufficient. Second, the quotes are long. They are very descriptive and certainly reflect many of the issues raised by medical examiners in quantitative and treatment outcome studies.

 I have some concerns that the interview responses are not sufficiently anonymized. Some greater assurance that people could not identify the participants from the quotes is needed (or that the participants would not mind).  It could be useful to check with the participants to ensure that they understand the detail in which their statements are being reported. I am not sure all the detail is needed to communicate the ideas. I would certainly eliminate mention of participant number.

A qualitative paper you might have missed.

Wayland, S., Cook, O., Cartwright, A., Ryan, J., Brondolo, E., Bassed, R., & Bugeja, L. (2021). The nature and impact of occupational trauma exposure among staff working in a forensic medical and scientific service: a qualitative interview study. Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences, 1-12.