Inductive and Deductive Research Approaches

in this lecture I'm going to talk about the difference between inductive and deductive research this was one of the more complicated concepts that I myself had you know trouble understanding and so I'm going to it took me a while to learn this so I understand that this is kind of a difficult concept for you to understand who I hopefully I can explain it to you that in a way that helps you learn it a little bit quicker than I did so before we talk about like the difference between inductive and deductive research I want to introduce you to the research circle the research circle is a process is a visual diagram that represents the the research process and there are there are four basic components of the research process theory which represents a set of ideas that help you explain a particular social phenomenon I have hypothesis which is a testable prediction about the relationship between two or more variables empirical observations things that you pick out and identify or can label in the social world and then analysis things like statistics and and qualitative data analysis where you're analyzing themes from interviews or observations or using statistics to identify patterns within numerical data so these are these are the different components of the research process process inductive and deductive research specify kind of where you begin on this research project where where your research journey starts that is really what distinguishes inductive from deductive research because in inductive research you begin with the research question and that research question guides your collection of impaired data which you then use to generate a testable hypothesis or a tentative hypothesis which you confirm with additional data and then that that data becomes the basis for forming a social theory of a set of ideas that you can use to explain your topic so with inductive research you're beginning by collecting data so you're you're collecting empirical observations about the social world based on those empirical observations you're forming a hypothesis which you then use to test with additional data to develop a theory so in inductive research you're beginning with empirical observations now that differs from deductive research in which you're actually you begin by reviewing a particular social theory and based on that theory you form a hypothesis which you then test with empirical data and either confirm or refute that hypothesis based on your analysis of that data so deductive research approaches begin with a theory driven hypothesis so there might be an existing theory to explain a particular topic and you form a hypothesis that's based on that theory which then guides your data collection and analysis so you might design a particular survey to collect information about a set of variables in your hypothesis which you then analyze and and either in that feeds back to the theory so you might add to or maybe revise a particular theory based on your analysis now let me give you some examples of inductive and deductive research approaches an example of an inductive research question might be how do undergraduate students view the causes of homelessness what do they perceive as the solutions to homelessness so you know rather than identifying an existing social theory this in with with this research question you might begin by collecting data from a group of undergraduate students and really try to understand how they view the causes of homelessness what do they perceive as the solutions to homelessness so this was a published article in the Journal of poverty recently and this is inductive because you're you're beginning by with a set of you're beginning by collecting data you're interviewing students and others trying to understand how they view the causes of homelessness and how they view the solutions in it and then these observations might lead you to develop a hypothesis where you test with data and you use that information to develop a theory so it's inductive because you're starting with the data collection now deductive an example of a research question that's more deductive in nature is our perceptions of discrimination among young adults related to psychological distress and does discrimination help to explain racial differences in depressive symptoms so this this research question is deductive because it actually these research questions and the hypotheses that can be formulated from the research question are sort of drawing from an existing social theory it's actually the stress processed theory that specifies how stress is related to health and how social characteristics affect exposure to stress and how personal social resources moderate the relationship between stress and health and so based on the stress process theory this researcher was able to conduct a study to form a hypothesis about one form of social stress discrimination and how it relates to discriminative research in the sense that there was an existing social theory the researcher formed the hypothesis collected data in the form of a survey and and use that data to analyze and test that hypothesis and update existing social theory

Channel: David Russell

Views: 188,874

Rating: 4.820715 out of 5

Keywords: Inductive Reasoning (Field Of Study), Deductive Reasoning (Field Of Study), Research (Industry)

Id: QB41z6_mUxk

Length: 6min 43sec (403 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2015