How did you collect your data? Was it a questionnaire?

You could group the subject matter for each closed question with others that are similar and develop categories, describing the general consensus. It may be that some participants tended to give similar responses to others.

Would it be possible to select a number of participants in order to carry out further data collection and use open-ended questions, allowing you to collect data on which you could conduct qualitative analysis?

Could you ask advice from the person who recommended you to do a qualitative analysis?

I just have patients' medical history data, and I guess I should probably ask my supervisor first. Thank you for your reply. Is descriptive data can be included as qualitative analysis ??

Yes, I think you could use descriptive data; if it was to be qualitative, it would be qualitative data that you used. If you did not use quantitative data along side it, in which case it would be mixed research.

These links might be helpful:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1362168815572747

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2333393617742282

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276397426_Qualitative_and_descriptive_research_Data_type_versus_data_analysis

Ask your supervisor, but also add any questions to this discussion or start a new RG discussion if you get stuck. There might be other members who can help.

Good luck,

Mary

First, you should be clear whether your supervisor is just referring to Yes-No data as "qualitative." This is a rather old fashioned terminology, but some quantitative researchers still refer to binary data as qualitative.

Second, if the goal is indeed to do a qualitative analysis of your quantitative data, there is a relative rare option called "qualitizing." Generally speaking, this involves treating the individual participants as "cases" that can be characterized according to patterns in the quantitative data.

My opinion, any questions that must be answered "yes" or "no" must then be interpreted by the analyst as to what these answers mean. This can hardly be avoided in question/answer studies, but I prefer a short textual answer where a group of analysts can negotiate the meaning.

Any question incorporates quality information. Frequency (fi) answers reinforce one reality or the other realities.

So we analyze the realities and emphasize their frequencies.