Understanding the Difference Between Inductive Vs. Deductive Research

Understanding inductive vs deductive phenomena is an ongoing discussion among the students. The students who try to grasp their heads around both of these face a hard time. These two research methods are used in research methodologies, implying they are mostly used in your research paper. There are two ways that you can conduct research, and both can be used separately or combined. However, without knowing what both of these methods are, you will not be able to employ them right in your assignment.

That is why we are going to peel the layers of inductive vs deductive research. We will explain to you all what inductive and deductive research methods are. In addition, of course, we are going to give you a brief overview of how to apply them in your research and assignment. However, before you lean on to the writing process of your assignment, you will have to understand their pros and cons too. This piece of information on their pros and cons will help you in deciding whether you want to implement inductive or deductive research in your assignment.

A Basic Introduction to Inductive and Deductive Research

Understanding inductive vs deductive is not difficult, but students face difficulty remembering the basic difference between both. You just have to remember that while one focuses on developing theories, the other focuses on testing theories. Inductive research is a method of gathering specific data to make conclusions and develop new theories around a generalization. On the other hand, deductive research is a method of thinking about a hypothesis first and then gathering data to test its validity and shed light on the implications of the hypothesis to make conclusions.

Pros and Cons of Inductive and Deductive Research

Now that you have understood the meanings of inductive vs deductive research let’s move on to learning about them in a little more detail. Without knowing the advantages and disadvantages of both methods, you will fail to accurately use them and apply them in your research paper. This will lead to the failure of your assignment’s objective and make you score poorly. In order to avoid letting that happen, here are some pros and cons of inductive research, followed by the pros and cons of deductive research to make you better understand which one is right for you.

Pros and Cons of Inductive

As per the experts of research paper writing service, the pros of inductive research are:

• It allows you to explore new information without preconceived notions.
• It provides you the liberty to adapt and make new discoveries based on data.
• It successfully represents real-world scenarios and their nuances.
• It provides deeper insights into a particular context by focusing on specific instances.
• It helps you develop new hypotheses and contribute to your field of study by paving the way for the expansion of new information.

Having put together in front of you about what are the pros of inductive, keeping in mind the inductive vs deductive, here are the cons of inductive research:

• It has a certain degree of researcher’s biases on the findings, leading to invalidity concerns
• It is a time-consuming process since it involves data collection, analysis and theory development
• It might have limited explanatory power since it focuses on specific instances
• It has certain limitations to verifying conclusions or replicating findings as it is of a subjective nature

Pros and Cons of Deductive

Now that we have discussed the pros and cons of inductive research, it is time for the next level of information in the battle of inductive vs deductive research. Here are the pros of deductive research at first:

• It allows for accurate testing and validation since it involves an initial hypothesis
• It aims to narrow the researcher’s biases through data collection and analytical procedures
• Its findings can be more validated since the data collection is based on existing hypotheses
• It can apply to a larger population since the findings are derived from a systematic approach and tested

The pros of the deductive approach have one less point than the inductive approach. However, our experts in the paper writing service emphasize that the scope of the deductive approach is larger than that of the inductive approach. Nonetheless, here are the cons of deductive research:

• It is more rigid as there are unexpected findings and complex data, leading to an oversimplification of a subject matter
• It restricts the development of understanding as it overlooks the underlying unanticipated and unanswered questions
• It compromises the validity of findings since the researcher may selectively interpret particular data to support the hypothesis
• It overlooks the contextual factors by fitting within the existing hypotheses, leading to oversimplifying the complex matters

How to Implement Both in Your Assignment

Following inductive vs deductive representations by sharing the pros and cons of both, let’s move on to how you can implement both of them in your research paper. 

Implementation of Inductive Research

• Identify and form a research question that can be explored
• Design your data collection methods (qualitative and quantitative)
• Gather the data based on the chosen data collection methods
• Analyze the collected data and observe patterns or themes
• Based on analysis, develop concepts and theory development
• Draw conclusions and discuss implications with future research

Implementation of Deductive Research

• Form a hypothesis or a theory based on existing research or literature
• Decide your research design to test the hypothesis/theory systematically
• Implement the design to gather the required data to test your hypothesis
• Analyze the gathered data using appropriate techniques
• Draw conclusions based on the relationship between variables of findings

Effectively Implement the Research Method

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