3.2 Choosing A Research Approach

we have arrived to the point when we are supposed to choose what we call a research approach and here we have three possibilities we can have deductive research approach inductive research approach and abductive research approach now even though that there are three choices you if you are a bachelor or master student you will most likely end up with a deductive approach and maybe inductive approach you are very unlikely to end up with abductive approach because these kind of research is simply take much longer time than is the time that you have dedicated to write your thesis and now when when you are thinking about these three approaches the idea is very simple when you are doing a research you have two things you have a data and you help theories theories are basically included in your literature review and data is what you will collect now these free approaches are telling us basically how are we treating these two entities if we are going to do deductive approach we will go from theories to data if we have inductive approach we will go from data to theories and if we have a ductile approach it's very similar to inductive we are also going from data to theories but it's a little bit more complicated I will come back to that later so it start off with describing the most simple research approach which is deductive it's so simple because your task is to simply find a theories let's say some very well-known and generally defined theories and trying to apply them to a specific phenomenon and your data will then either approve or disapprove these theories that you have tried to apply and both of these outcomes will be valuable and I mean I see a lot of confusion people often think that deductive approach cannot provide anything new but that's not true you know even when we will try to apply these theories you take Theory first and then the data you can come up with something new and this is also what happened to us when we were I think our research we we took some theories are to the to the specific phenomena and found out ok these theories do not work and immediately as we were rejecting the old theories we have started to think ok we can do it this way we can do it that way so don't worry when you are doing a deductive approach you still can come up with something new and valuable as I mentioned the second choice is to have inductive approach here you go for data first and then you just try to formulate the theory so it's exactly the other way around and the deductive approach now inductive approach is really cool and it sounds really cool that you can formulate your own theories yes it is true but on the other hand it's much harder to manage it's much harder from a methodological perspective to justify that you are doing everything correctly as you should now there is another another problem with inductive research and that is that truly inductive research does not take any theories as its background you just have to start writing from scratch and I have read many academic articles and I have seen maybe just two or three truly inductive academic papers and one of them which was the most gorgeous one that I've seen did not help a single reference to other literature and it was amazing paper but it took I think 10 years to construct that academic paper so you will most likely not end up with truly inductive approach what you can end up with is some sort of a mixed I think it's called mix of induction and deduction that in the beginning you take some very little amount of theories you go into the field and you try to gather a lot of data from which you will formulate your own theories so you have some theories in the early beginnings of your research but it's still considered to be sort of inductive approach so be very careful about this finally we have abductive approach and this is really tricky concept to grasp now abductive approach is very close to inductive in a sense that we are going from data theories but inductive approach it is assumed that you help assess all of the relevant data to construct the theories while in a deductive approach you are assumed to have just enough data to formulate some theories which might be correct or which should be correct now an example abductive reasoning or abductive approach is medical diagnosis I mean when you are at a doctor and you tell some symptoms you are having a headache you have some skin problems then this doctor does not have all the information about you just hopefully enough information to give you a correct answer of what the problem is again another example of abductive reasoning is when a policeman comes to a criminal case I mean a policeman or detective does not have all of the information about what happened but just some limited amount of information from which this policeman will try to have a conclusion of what happened and this is the same with researches if you have abductive research you try to collect enough information to formulate solid enough theories it's a very tricky concept to graph so I hope I simplified it correctly all right those are the three approaches that you can choose from as I already mentioned you I recommend mostly the deductive approach maybe consider inductive if it sounds interesting for you and looking forward to see you in the next videos

Channel: MeanThat & Authentic Data Science

Views: 110,710

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Keywords: research, research thesis, writing a thesis, writing academic paper, writing academic research, research design, research approach, literature review, research strategy, primary and secondary data, sampling of research

Id: _T2BmiHEV0I

Length: 5min 55sec (355 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 17 2016