QUALITATIVE HEALTH RESEARCH / May 2000Massé / PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS Qualitative and Quantitative Analyses of Psychological Distress: Methodological

Rigorous qualitative and quantitative methodologies have been used for the development of a multidimensional scale dedicated to the measurement of psychological distress. A compari-son between the idioms of distress or the cultural forms through which French Quebecois express their distress (qualitative constructs) and the nonorthogonal factors derived from explanatory and higher order factorial analyses (quantitative constructs) illustrates the pos-sibilities of complementarity between qualitative and quantitative approaches. The compari-son shows that these two operationalizations of the concept of psychological distress are founded on incommensurable representations of distress. This article concludes that this representational dilemma of distress as a lived language or as an empirical reified entity leads to an ontological and a teleological incommensurability. The complementarity of qualitative and quantitative methods and epistemolo-gies has been a key issue in the past two decades. Throughout the past 15 years, I have conducted many research projects that use complementary techniques for data collection and analysis. Although I am an anthropologist by profession, I have worked extensively with epidemiologists and psychometricians in multidisciplin-ary research teams. As such, I have become interested in the quest for complemen