In my field of information systems research, I always argue that it's about the generalization of knowledge but that tends to be rather complicated to communicate successfully to reviewers.

Hello,

The term 'transferable' used in qualitative research can be used as 'generalizability' may be seen as a quantitative term.

For a project to be transferable, readers need to be able to assess the research for applicability in their own situations (so sufficient detail needs to be included to allow this to happen). The references I used for this are quite old now, but may be helpful:

Patton MQ. Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods. 2nd ed. Newbury Park: Sage Publications; 1990. (see p.34)

This is the author: Michael Quinn Patton but the edition of his book that you can request is the 3rd ed. 2002, and has been revised since the 1990 ed. that I used. But you could ask him about generalization/transferability.

Guba EG, Lincoln YS. Fourth Generation Evaluation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage; 1989. (see pp.241-2)

Lewis J, Ritchie J. Generalising from qualitative research. In: Ritchie J, Lewis J, editors. Qualitative Research Practice: A Guide for Social Science Students and Researchers. London: Sage Publications; 2003: 263-286. (see p.268, but the whole of Ch.10 might help)

https://mthoyibi.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/qualitative-research-practice_a-guide-for-social-science-students-and-researchers_jane-ritchie-and-jane-lewis-eds_20031.pdf

Leininger MM. Evaluation criteria and critique of qualitative research studies. In: Morse JM, editor. Critical Issues in Qualitative Research Methods. 1st ed. London: Sage; 1994: 95-115. (see p.107)

The term 'relevance' can also be used to gauge the relevance of the findings of one quantitative study to another.

I hope this is of help,

Mary 

Thank you both for your valuable suggestions, links and information.

Doing Qualitative research is a long process. If we speak about "generalizability" then it means that we are going through a large research project with a lot of cases that by induction we can generalize... But why should we "generalize" an observation. Supposing that we have a hunch about something ... In that case we can probably go through an abductive approach....