Study strengths and limitations
SAID
The current investigation is among the few studies that have explored processes of change and longer term impacts of a low‐intensity psychosocial intervention aimed at young people. When considered alongside the host trial results (which lacked a fully powered mediation analysis; Malik et al., We also acknowledge several study limitations. We did not systematically collect data on those trial participants who were approached but declined to take part in qualitative interviews and it is possible that our sample may have been skewed towards more highly engaged participants. However, we note that over three quarters of the counsellor‐led format participants were completers in both the host trial and the current nested qualitative study.Our team lacked “outsider” perspectives that might have offered alternative insights during data analysis and interpretation. In particular, our interest in developing effective problem‐solving interventions may have inadvertently led to an interpretive bias that minimized negative attributes of the problem‐solving approach and emphasized positive attributes. That said, we deliberately recruited participants with varying levels of intervention engagement and our topic guide specifically probed negative intervention experiences. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that the credibility of the findings could have been strengthened further through the use of participatory approaches to analysis, such as respondent validation (Sellars et al., Our study was designed to explore processes of change at the individual level and within the adolescent–counsellor dyad for two low‐intensity problem‐solving intervention formats. There is also a need for research, informed by implementation science principles, that engages more fully with the wider context of intervention delivery (e.g. factors affecting fidelity to the intervention model). Such evidence is vital for developing implementation strategies that can bolster the external validity of the interventions, while ensuring fidelity to the main theorised active ingredient of problem solving (Bauer & Kirchner, 