I am a bit confused and I need your expertise help in acknowledging whether we should represent the qualitative results in a semi-structured interview in an anonymous way (few, some, many) or report it as specific data, 3 out of 6 for example 50% of respondents... and so on, as I am getting reviewers' comments from different journals, some of whom recommended that in qualitative research numbers should not be stated and to be totally removed, others who found this ambiguous and asked for representing the data from each question as % respondents, I appreciate your clarification in this regard..!
No, it is not generally recommended to cite percentages associated with themes and other outcomes in qualitative research. One simple reason is that the numbers involved are almost always too small to support meaningful percents -- a quantitative researcher would recognize this a problem of "misplaced precision." From a more qualitative point of view, our analyses are inherently subjective, so there is no guarantee for the numbers that would be generated by counting.
One common compromise is to use wordings such as "almost all" or "only one."
You are indeed addressing an issue that is not formally codified in empirical qualitative social research.
David L. Morgan rightly points out the important argument: If 'n' (number of subjects in the survay) is very small, an indication of the number or percentage suggests an empirical and/or statistical representation that is not considered scientifically valid compared to the corresponding population. Do not be so impressed by the positions of your reviewers - they seem to disagree on this point as well. From this point of view, deal with the issue offensively: Explain how you proceed and why. And then you can use terms like 'one', 'half' or 'almost all'.
When discussing numbers and percentages, we should not ignore the essential underlying meaning of qualitative methods. Especially in the course of explorative research, qualitative methods are used to identify possible casual references in the first place and to initiate a process of theory building. In this way, theoretical approaches and empirical findings can later be coordinated and aggregated at a higher level. Only on such a basis does it make sense to use quantitative methods and to report formal numbers and percentages.
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