In qualitative research, is it ok to say 'some students think A..., some students think B...; while some other students think C..." I did not count how many students in each group, or the percentage, because I did not think the number is important. However, my supervisor dislikes the word 'some', he wanted me to use another word or term. Is he wrong by having a quantitative mind, or my using 'some' is wrong?

Any thoughts/comments are appreciated.

'some students think A..., some students think B...; while some other students think C..."

The sentence above could mean:
1. 90% think A, 8% think B, 2% think C
2. 34% think A, 33% think B, 33% think C
3. 50% think A, 25% think B, 25% think C

I would say that those differences may be important to the interpretation of your findings.

I'm not a qual researcher, so I may be wrong, but just because something is qualitative I don't think you can totally ignore relative magnitude. A sentence like "A few students thought A, some thought B, but the majority thought C." is more informative than the sentence you originally gave.

Of course if all you want to do is simply identify all the opinion options within a group, maybe your original approach is sufficient. I would expect, though, at the very least you would need to report how many people were in the overall group.

I would probably just try to be a bit more descriptive, not by using numbers but by varying the language a bit. 'A commonly expressed view was that.....', 'Several of the students also thought.....' - that sort of thing.

I suppose it depends what, if any claims you are making from this qualitative information. I've been taught that qualitative data still needs to be contextualised so you should record how many people said what, their gender, where and how the info was gathered etc etc. In my MA I went with a mix of Chickpea and HazyJanes approach by saying things like 'a commonly expressed view (80% of respondents) was that....' Of course statistics can be inflated so if you only spoke to 10 people, 80% sounds like a lot but isn't in real terms so you might want to say 8 out of 10 people said.....

thesaurus. com might help you a lot in finding the right synonym. In my opinion, you repeat "some" too many times in a single paragraph. Try writing it as the following:
" Part of the students think A...,
others rely on B...;
and some of them consider C as an answer"

Let me know if it helps and have a great day!

I must agree with HazyJane on this one. Quantity matters, especially in a research. For instance, if you are doing a marketing research, you will have to run your data through a predictive analytics software and base your conclusions on hard data and statistical analysis. In that case how are you going to measure "some"?

I agree that for small sample sizes, percentages might not be helpful. But I was trying to make the point that 'some' sufficiently ambiguous as to not be helpful either. If you have 20 people and 'some' people express and opinion, to my mind it makes a difference if that 'some' represents 2 people or represents 18. It may have limited generalisability, but it's worth knowing if something is expressed by the majority of your sample, or only a couple of people.

I do agree that the underlying themes are important, particularly if those opinions expressed overlap to some degree