Qualitative and quantitative analyses of psychological distress: methodological complementarity and ontological incommensurability.

Rigorous qualitative and quantitative methodologies have been used for the development of a multidimensional scale dedicated to the measurement of psychological distress. A comparison 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 possibilities of complementarity between qualitative and quantitative approaches. The comparison 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.