Dear colleagues,
In my experience, some evaluations received in the peer review process of journals, often include criticisms based on the QUANTITY of examples you can claim you have in a collection of conversational data, suggesting that they should be "many", in order to consider that the specific phenomenon you are addressing is "recurrent" and thus worthy of interest or attention. In other cases, however, this is not required by the reviews, they do not put much attention on this matter.
In my view, if you have several instances (for example, 4, 5, 6...) of a very specific phenomenon, that occur in an almost identical conversational context, showing similar or related features, that would be worthy of attention and could be considered as "recurrent", despite it is perhaps not generalizable.
What do you think of this matter and/or how do you think these kinds of criticisms could be best addressed?
Thank you so much!
Virginia - I assume that you are referring to qualitative data here? On that basis, I assume that the 'quantity' refers to the number of narrative participant quotations that are used to illustrate an identified 'theme/sub-theme?' If this is the case, then there should be a good balance of offered examples i.e. one or two examples are not 'rich' evidence of a whole theme - whereas ten or more would perhaps be 'over-doing' it - especially from a word count perspective. Three to five (depending on length) is often considered appropriate.
Virginia - I assume that you are referring to qualitative data here? On that basis, I assume that the 'quantity' refers to the number of narrative participant quotations that are used to illustrate an identified 'theme/sub-theme?' If this is the case, then there should be a good balance of offered examples i.e. one or two examples are not 'rich' evidence of a whole theme - whereas ten or more would perhaps be 'over-doing' it - especially from a word count perspective. Three to five (depending on length) is often considered appropriate.
Yes, I was referring yo qualitative data, which involve relatively long stretches of talk to illustrate a subtheme, Dean White, thank you very much!
I personally think that what matters most is the richness of the quotations that you provide, rather than the number of them. So, if you have longer statements from your informants, then two-well chosen examples might well be enough.
As far as characterizing their frequency goes, I prefer text-base summaries (e.g., "nearly all" or "one of the most frequently mentioned...") rather than numbers. In particular, if you have just a few key informants, than a shift of only 1 or 2 cases could have what appears to be a large shift in your percentages.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Cognitive Science
- Thinking