I plan to do an online survey to gather responses from participants using a widely used stress scale. The results are either low, medium or high and out from this, I can infer as to which level of stress my sample has experienced.
I believe it is "Inductive" as I gather the data first. Am I right? Thank you for your advise. ☺️
First Inductive - simulation and then deductive - specific design based .
Inductive: Reasoning moves from specific observations to broad generalizations.
Deductive: Reasoning moves from broad generalizations to specific observations.
The terms "inductive" and "deductive" are not directly related to quantitative data collection. If you use the data from your sample to make assumptions about a broader population that would indeed be inductive. But you can also first deduce some assumptions based on a general statement ("everyone is stressed out around Christmas time" -> people in my sample are stressed). Then you can use the data from your sample to confirm that statement (or not). It all depends on the goal of your study.
Dear Daryl Eborda ,
Just to clarify:
1. I think you are talking about a questionnaire type of survey. Other kinds include interviews and focus groups.
2. You can collect both quantitative (numbers and frequencies of responses to categorical questions) and qualitative (text) data from a questionnaire.
3. Whilst quantitative data should always lead to quantitative analysis, qualitative data from a questionnaire can lead to either qualitative or quantitative analysis. Many responsea to open ended questions are short, meaning that the frequency of words, short phrases or synonyms can be counted.
4. As you are using a widely used scale there should be a standard way of combining items together into scale (numeric) variables. You can either simply describe this data and interpret it informally or carry out a deductive analysis based on a hypothesis.
Thus, the answer to your question is the analysis of your particular questionnaire might be deductive or simply descriptive, but it should certainly not be inductive as you are not generating qualitative constructs from text.
A lot depends on how you intend to use your scale. If it is an independent or dependent variable in an analysis, then that is much more likely to be deductive. Alternatively, if it is purely descriptive, then that is much more likely to be inductive -- but in this case, it is questionable what you purpose would be for collecting one more piece of data in such a widely studied topic area.
Be careful on deductive or inductive, on its relevancy toward quantitative
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