I am currently in the process of writing my dissertation. My literature review is about exploring new and existing current trends within the supply chain, focusing a lot on technology and sustainability. The aim of my primary research is to collect customer opinions about digital developments and the future of logistics through an anonymous questionnaire. Would that be classed as an inductive or deductive approach? Thank you in advance :)
Since you are starting with a sample and you probably would like to use the collected data to generalize your findings to a larger population, you will be using an inductive approach.
Most likely you are also formulating hypotheses, rather than testing existing ones. All that points to inductive research.
Good luck!
Surveys are most commonly used to test hypotheses, which makes them deductive research i.e. they start with theories that determine the appropriate observations.
Reasoning from a sample to a population is indeed a kind of induction, but surveys are seldom used to "formulate hypotheses." Instead, they typically include independent and dependent variables, with statistical tests to analyze the relationships between them. If that is what you plan to do, then it is deductive research.
Desislava Draganova , "usually inductive approach requires qualitative data over quantitative": this is not the case. Inductive, just as deductive, can be either.
David L Morgan Thank you for your time and attention. I have not set a hypothesis because in my literature review I have researched new trends and whether they are beneficial from a company's point of view, however, in my primary research I am trying to find new information which is based on the customer perspective and how they feel about those developments.
In an ideal situation, my research would have been interviews or real life-based case studies but with the current pandemic and limited time it has been more convenient to conduct quantitative research that doesn't really fit with the philosophy I wanted to incorporate or my inductive approach, but I was thinking to add this to the limitations of my research :)
Leopold Hamminger and Andrew Paul McKenzie Pegman also thank you for your help :)
Desislava Draganova It is entirely possible to conduct qualitative interviews via the internet or email, a lot of people are doing that in response to the current pandemic.
Indeed, I think that might be easier than trying to convert a survey into an inductive (exploratory?) tool. I suppose one way to do this might be to create a new measure, that you could develop with exploratory factor analysis.
Since you are starting with a survey and you would like to use the collected data to generalize your findings , you will be using an inductive approach.
But if you will complete your work with a new model or framework and you will test the result of your suggestion you will be using a deductive approach after the inductive approach, as a result you will combine between two approaches.
To me it is deductive as you want to deduce what are the customers conditions.
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