Quantitizing findings from qualitative studies for integration in mixed methods reviewing

Abstract

In mixed methods reviewing, data from quantitative and qualitative studies are combined at the review level. One possible way to combine findings of quantitative and qualitative studies is to quantitize qualitative findings prior to their incorporation in a quantitative review. There are only a few examples of the quantification of qualitative findings within this context. This study adds to current research on mixed methods review methodology by reporting the pilot implementation of a new four-step quantitizing approach. We report how we extract and quantitize the strength of relationships found in qualitative studies by assigning correlations to vague quantifiers in text fragments. This article describes (a) how the analysis is prepared; (b) how vague quantifiers in text fragments are organized and transformed to numerical values; (c) how qualitative studies as a whole are assigned effect sizes; and (d) how the overall mean effects size and variance can be calculated. The pilot implementation shows how findings from 26 primary qualitative studies are transformed into mean effect sizes and corresponding variances.