Making Sense of Qualitative and Quantitative Findings in Mixed Research Synthesis Studies

Abstract

The synthesis of qualitative and quantitative research findings is increasingly promoted, but many of the conceptual and methodological issues it raises have yet to be fully understood and resolved. In this article, we describe how we handled issues encountered in efforts to synthesize the findings in forty-two reports of studies of antiretroviral adherence in HIV-positive women in the course of an ongoing study to develop methods to synthesize qualitative and quantitative research findings in common domains of health-related research. Working with these reports underscored the importance of looking past method claims and ideals and directly at the findings themselves, differentiating between aggregative syntheses in which findings are assimilated and interpretive syntheses in which they are configured, and understanding the judgments involved in designating relationships between findings as confirmatory, divergent, or complementary.

Individual and Collective Dimensions of Resilience Within Political Violence

“…Forty-one articles focused on aspects of individual resilience and eight focused on community resilience. The review utilizes an integrated design to examine quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods studies; this integrated design was chosen because of the potential for findings from across study designs to collectively advance knowledge about political violence and resilience (Voils, Sandelowski, Barroso, & Hasselblad, 2008). For more information about the types of methods used across studies (e.g., surveys, narrative research, ethnography/case study; mixed methods, longitudinal), see Table 1.…”

Factors related to obesity and overweight among Black adolescent girls in the United States

“…To accommodate the diversity of factors explored, our synthesis began by grouping findings that were topically similar and focused on producing a configuration of findings. This data-inspired synthesis did not require repetition of a factor to be included, and findings were viewed as complementing but not confirming each other (such as in meta-analyses; Voils et al 2008). Through the synthesis process it became evident that the bioecological theory for human development (Bronfenbrenner 2005) was a valuable approach to configure the findings.…”

“…The authors defined factors related to obesity and overweight to include broadly: (1) studies that addressed associated factors, covariates, and other statistical descriptions (e.g., prevalence of factor by weight status, bivariate analyses) that have been related to obesity, overweight, and/or increases in BMI or adiposity in Black girls, and (2) studies that reported individuals’ understanding and/or experience of factors related to obesity, overweight, and weight gain among Black girls. As qualitative reports using interviews and thematic analysis approaches often produce findings similar in interpretive depth to the descriptive findings in quantitative reports, the authors definition appropriately promoted the inclusion of both quantitative and qualitative investigations (Voils et al 2008). …”

Developing a model for understanding patient collection of observations of daily living: a qualitative meta-synthesis of the Project HealthDesign program

“…We conducted a qualitative meta-synthesis [25–31] of the five projects that comprise the PHD program – Round 2. This involved interpretation and synthesis of documents and data we collected from each of the PHD projects and examining these data to identify patterns and summarize key findings [25].…”