Transforming Verbal Counts in Reports of Qualitative Descriptive Studies Into Numbers

Abstract

Reports of qualitative studies typically do not offer much information on the numbers of respondents linked to any one finding. This information may be especially useful in reports of basic, or minimally interpretive, qualitative descriptive studies focused on surveying a range of experiences in a target domain, and its lack may limit the ability to synthesize the results of such studies with quantitative results in systematic reviews. Accordingly, the authors illustrate strategies for deriving plausible ranges of respondents expressing a finding in a set of reports of basic qualitative descriptive studies on antiretroviral adherence and suggest how the results might be used. These strategies have limitations and are never appropriate for use with findings from interpretive qualitative studies. Yet they offer a temporary workaround for preserving and maximizing the value of information from basic qualitative descriptive studies for systematic reviews. They show also why quantitizing is never simply quantitative. Keywords mixed-methods research; qualitative; quantitizing; research synthesisThe ability to integrate qualitative and quantitative findings in systematic reviews of research sometimes depends on the extent to which qualitative findings can be converted to a form compatible with quantitative findings or the extent to which quantitative findings can be converted to a form compatible with qualitative findings. In the mixed-methods research literature, references are routinely made to what Teddlie and Tashakkori (2006, p. 17) called "conversion designs" that consist of analytic strategies in which qualitative and quantitative data are transformed to allow either statistical or textual treatment of both data sets (e.g., Greene, 2007;Onwuegbuzie & Teddlie, 2003). The direction of data conversion (qualitative Please address correspondence to Yunkyung Chang at ykchang@email.unc.edu. For reprints and permissions queries, please visit SAGE's Web site at http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav. → quantitative or quantitative → qualitative) will depend on which one will better accommodate the research purpose and nature of the data to be combined. NIH Public AccessIn the course of an ongoing study directed toward developing methods to synthesize qualitative and quantitative research findings, we were experimenting with ways to "quantitize" (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998, p. 126) a set of qualitative findings or to convert them into a form that would make them combinable with a set of quantitative findings on the same topic. This required knowing the number of respondents linked to any one finding, but the reports of the qualitative studies we reviewed offered little information on this number. Accordingly, we describe here practical ways we developed to derive this information from qualitative reports that may make their findings combinable with those in quantitative reports. We illustrate these strategies using a set of 11 reports of qualitative studies on antiretroviral adherence (marked with an aste...

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