Review History
Examining the interplay between mental health indicators and quality of life measures among first-year law students: a cross-sectional study

When going through the final tasks prior to production of the article, I recommend you consider editing your abstract results to list either correlation values or standardised beta values instead of mean values. This is because in that part of the abstract you are referring to correlational type results instead of mean camparison type results.

[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Jafri Abdullah, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]

**PeerJ Staff Note:** Although the Academic and Section Editors are happy to accept your article as being scientifically sound, a final check of the manuscript shows that it would benefit from further editing. Therefore, please identify necessary edits and address these while in proof stage.

Please revise your manuscript and on resubmission provide a point-by-point response to how things have been edited. In any cases where you have not made changes based on a reviewer comment, please provide justification for that decision.

INTRODUCTION AND DISCUSSION:

R1 and R2 have highlighted that in your introduction you have not discussed relevant prior literature investigating law student mental health. It is important to situate your research within the pre-existing literature on the topic. I recommend signficantly shortening the introductory material on the broad nature of relationships between certain factors and wellbeing to make room for much more coverage of the relevant prior literature. I recommend making a sub-heading titled something like 'Prior studies examining mental health of law students' and under that sub-heading discuss the literature on this topic. By doing this, you might be able to determine how your research contributes to the literature on this topic, and make an explicit statement about that under the 'research objectives' sub-section.

Read the introduction of this paper you will see many relevant papers cited that you can also look up, and discuss: Skead, N. K., Rogers, S. L., & Johnson, W. R. (2020). The role of place, people and perception in law student well-being. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 73, 101631.

All reviewers have highlighted that you have not discussed your research findings within the context of relevant background literature. By covering relevant literature in your introduction section as mentioned above, you can then refer back to that literature in your discussion section to address this criticism from reviewers.

Much of the material included in your discussion is not entirely relevant. Please edit to discuss your findings in the context of relevant prior background literature instead. When I say 'relevant' I am referring specifically to other prior studies that have investigated law student mental health.

METHOD:

The reviewers have highlighted that you have not provided adequate description of the questionnaires used in your research. Please provide that detail in your revision. I recommend looking up other survey research papers to see how this is typically done.

RESULTS:

I note that p = .000 is stated many times throughout your results. This should be changed to p < .05 (or alternatively p < .001). Please note that there are some statistical software programs that report p values as zero due to issues with presentation of the very small numbers. In reality, what gets reported as zero is not a zero value number, it is instead a very small number like 0.0000000000003456 or something similar.

Your regression analysis does not appear to be reported or interpreted as per standard practice for reporting such analysis. I recommend looking at other research papers that report on multiple regression analysis (and look up relevant chapters in statistics textbooks) to gain some insights into how this is done and modify accordingly. When you look into the background literature on papers on law student mental health you should come across a few of those studies that have reported a regression analysis. Note that in multiple regression analysis like what you have done, the standardised regression coefficients are more informative than unstandardised coefficients. You should report on both the unstandardised and standardised coeefficients. If you do not feel comfortable with reporting and interpreting regression analysis, you might wish to consider leaving that out of your paper on your revision, and stick to only reporting and discussing the correlations.