AIM In this paper, I call into question the widely-held assumption of a single, more or less unified paradigm of 'qualitative research' whose methodologies share certain epistemological and ontological characteristics, and explore the implications of this position for judgements about the quality of research studies. BACKGROUND After a quarter of a century of debate in nursing about how best ...

UNLABELLED A new form of literature review has emerged, Mixed Studies Review (MSR). These reviews include qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods studies. In the present paper, we examine MSRs in health sciences, and provide guidance on processes that should be included and reported. However, there are no valid and usable criteria for concomitantly appraising the methodological quality of t...

Design of optimal plans for environmental planning and management applications should ideally consider the multiple quantitative and qualitative criteria relevant to the problem. For example, in ground water monitoring design problems, qualitative criteria such as acceptable spatial extent and shape of the contaminant plume predicted from the monitored locations can be equally important as the ...

Decision makers are commonly challenged with comparing, and ultimately ranking, elements regards to the degree which they satisfy multiple criteria in terms of their own preferences. This calls for a new decision making framework, we formally present here. Within such multi-criteria lex-cel: method ranking single elements. Furthermore, establish that our contributions generalise recent results ...

It is necessary to subject published research to critical scrutiny, in order to evaluate the robustness of the findings. The criteria used in evaluation require to be appropriate for the research paradigm, i.e. quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative conceptualizations of reliability and validity are unsuitable for evaluation of qualitative research as they were not devised for this purpose. ...

In the process of decision-making, sometimes analysts are given a sub-set of criteria for which statistical data are available from experiments, whereas for some other criteria, only qualitative judgments can be made. In such situations, it is important to consider the weights of experimental criteria along with the decision maker’s qualitative weights. Furthermore, in complex decision scenario...

decision making about outsourcing or insourcing of manufacturing activities is a type of multiple criteria decision making (mcdm) problem, which requires considering quantitative and qualitative factors as evaluation criteria simultaneously. therefore, a suitable mcdm method can be useful in this area as it can consider the interactions among quantitative and qualitative criteria. the analytic ...

Historically, qualitative research has been viewed as “soft” science and criticized for lacking scientific rigor compared to quantitative research, which uses experimental, objective methods (Mays & Pope, 1995). Common criticisms are that qualitative research is subjective, anecdotal, subject to researcher bias, and lacking generalizability by producing large quantities of detailed information ...