Newsgroups: bit.listserv.qualrs-l
Date:         Sat, 26 Dec 1992 22:08:22 PST
From:         David Morgan <HJDM@PSUORVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Pt. 2 Quant Journals

   In the previous posting, I argued that rhetorical issues were
more important than reliability issues in getting qualitative work
published in quantitative journals. The reason is that if your
rhetoric is convincing enough, the reviewers may even congratulate
you on using new methods to tackle difficult problems. Of course,
it also helps if you are working on a problem that is central to
their field. But there is no guarantee that this will be enough,
so it also helps to convince them that you have done your work in
a careful and systematic fashion--what I am terming the
reliability issue.

   There is no getting around the fact that numerical evidence is
the most effective way to convince quantitative reviewers that
your procedures are acceptable. Thus, I would recommend, if at all
possible, to start the presentation of your results with a couple
of tables. I want to be clear, however, that I am *not* advocating
that anyone should throw together some tables just to sell
qualitative results. If nothing else, you should forgo this
cynical exercise because there is very little likelihood that it
will work. If your numbers don't really have much to do with your
insights, this will be both obvious and annoying to a
quantitatively trained reviewer. If you really do not have a
numerical way of summarizing your argument, then you are better
off to rely on rhetoric, rather than to try to fool your reviewers
in their acknowledged area of expertise.

   The simplest way to produce the kinds of numbers that I am
advocating is to do some counting as part of your coding
procedures. I can think of both a strong and weak argument in
favor of including this kind of counting in a qualitative
analysis. The weak argument is that all right to use numbers in
summarizing qualitative analyses because we are not talking so
much about how conclusions are reached as how they are presented.
Thus, the weak argument is that if counts are just alternative
ways of presenting what you feel is worth knowing in your data,
then why not use them to communicate with your intended audience?
(This is similar to points I made in the first posting.)

   I should be clear that I am not talking about using the counts
as the primary summary of one's findings. Instead, what I have in
mind is to "motivate" the rest of the analysis through a
preliminary demonstration of "what is in the data" using tables of
counts. When I do this in my own work, the heart of my "results
section" still consists of stating and elaborating the central
themes that I found in the data, and I usually devote more total
page space to quotations than to tables. But I use the tables to
start the presentation, and then follow that with a much thicker
description of not just *what* the numbers showed, but also
discussions about *why* those were the patterns in the data.

   This leads me to the strong argument in favor of counting
things in qualitative data. If one in fact has something that is
countable, counting can be a useful way of uncovering patterns in
your data--provided, of course, that one then pursues the deeper
question of why these patterns exist. I have a brief piece coming
out in _Qualitative Health Research_ in January that makes the
case for this approach, which I call qualitative content analysis.
In that article, I go to some effort to distinguish this approach
from traditional forms of content analysis, that use computerized
searches of textual data to produce tables which constitute the
major results of the research. In my view, almost any coding that
is worth doing requires doing your own reading. And numerical
patterns that one finds in text are just a means of reentering the
data to ask more sharply focused questions.

   (I might as well add that I wrote this article in response to a
first round of reviews on a substantive article that will also be
coming out in a later issue of that journal. In this case, there
were two reviewers who were very concerned that I had used
numerical procedures in a qualitative analysis. Admittedly, what I
was doing was unfamiliar enough to require some further
explanation, but this does point out that problems surrounding the
use of numbers are not limited to quantitatively oriented
reviewers who are uncomfortable with qualitative analyses.)

   As a final topic, I want say a few words about numerical
assessments of inter-rater reliability. This is an issue that
shouldn't really concern qualitative researchers who aren't using
countable code categories. But when we do use such codes, either
through the weak argument that they can be a useful way of
summarizing insights that were arrived at through other means or
through the strong argument that counts can be useful in analyzing
some forms of qualitative data, then we do need to have some
certainty about the integrity of our coding efforts. More to the
point, your quantitative reviewers will probably demand it. (Good
discussions on how to calculate these various "coefficients" can
be found in textbooks on the more numerical variant of content
analysis.)

   Do we really know much more after we compute these
reliabilities? In principle, the answer is yes, because they
demonstrate the consistency of our coding principles. In practice,
however, I doubt if they tell us much, because a determined
researcher can almost always reproduce his or her coding
procedures. One of my clinical colleagues laughingly dismissed
inter-rater reliability as a "follie a deux." And what researcher
would pay good money to a coder who wasn't able to use the
project's coding system (i.e., apply the codes in the same way
that the researcher would).

   In the limiting case, these calculations undoubtedly do weed
out a few efforts at coding that are so personal that the
researcher cannot find anyone else who is capable of reproducing
them. I personally find that a more valuable use for these
procedures is in the early stages of coding, to point to code
categories that need more thought and to alert coders when they in
fact are seeing different things in the data. Truth to tell,
however, quantitative researchers do attach considerable
importance to these numbers, so, when we go their journals, it
behooves us to do likewise.

  Inter-rater reliabilities are a good place to close because they
can indeed be an example of what qualitative researchers fear
most: a requirement that we produce numbers which we feel are
virtually meaningless in order to get published. I personally do
not find this to be a serious problem because it does not force me
to distort my data or to make misstatements about how I did my
analyses. In my case, it simply asks me to do a little something
that I personally do not feel should be necessary. But if I
started complaining about all the things that journals expected me
to do just to get published, it would take up a lot more bandwidth
than I've already wasted with this discussion!


==>David Morgan hjdm@PSUORVM
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