Deductive versus Inductive Paradigms - Enjoy Your Business Research

Deductive versus Inductive Paradigms

Deductive research produces specific conclusions from general principles; inductive research constructs and/or explores general propositions from specific observations.

These two contrasting views represent different ways you can conduct your research.

If you undertake deductive research you will form hypotheses based on existing knowledge on your chosen subject. The subsequent research you conduct should conclusively confirm or reject each hypothesis. In larger scale business research, particular theories may then be revised in the light of such conclusions.

By contrast, if you conduct inductive research you construct and/or explore general propositions from specific, limited observations of a chosen phenomenon. In small business research projects, these observations often take the form of one or a small number of case studies. Your findings from such cases should then be generalized to a wider population of organizations in and beyond your research context.

Deductive research is therefore closely related to conclusive proof-driven logic, while inductive research involves non-conclusive, probabilistic reasoning. As the two views of research are fundamentally different in nature they cannot be combined. Moreover, you should avoid stating that you wish to adopt one view when you actually mean the other. You also need to be sensitive to the distinctly different language used by deductive and inductive researchers.

Category: TermsBy Wilson Ng 12th February 2019

Tags: Business research Deductive Deductive research Inductive

Author: Wilson Ng

http://www.enjoyyourbusinessresearch.com/

Professor Wilson Ng, PhD (Cantab.), MBA (London), MA (Cantab.), CDipAF (ACCA), FHEAI am a Visiting Professor in Entrepreneurship & Family Business at Regent’s University, London and an Adjunct Professor of Corporate Finance at Emlyon Business School, in Écully, France. I am a former investment banker who read Mathematics at Trinity College Cambridge on an open scholarship. On graduation, I joined the UK-French investment bank NM Rothschild & Sons as a management trainee. For ten years I was a corporate finance advisor of technology and non-technology start-ups, initially in London and then in Singapore. In 1992, I was head-hunted by the publicly-quoted specialist engineering firm, L&M Group Investments, as Group Finance & Treasury Director based in Singapore. When L&M was taken over in 1999, I returned to Cambridge to study for a doctorate in entrepreneurial family firms. In 2004 I graduated from Cambridge with a PhD (formally in Management Studies), and I have been a full-time research and teaching academic in the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation since my graduation. My research has involved comparative studies of resource management and strategic development processes in extremely challenge-based enterprises. These enterprises are motivated by economic, socio-cultural, cognitive, and/or physical challenges faced by their founders and stakeholders, whose continuing challenges inspire the development of particular adaptive skills and capabilities. I am interested in the ways in which creative actors in challenge-based enterprises are able to leverage their capabilities and networks to achieve goals they have established because of their extreme challenges. My current research advances this interest by exploring processes of opportunity creation among visually impaired entrepreneurs in a comparative study in the UK and USA. I am also an advisory board member of a London City-based fintech crowd-funder and crypto-coin exchange, Crowd for Angels, and a Founding Director of a valuation enterprise of new ventures, Business Valuation International. My mother tongues are Chinese Cantonese and English, and I speak and write German, Italian, French, and Bahasa Malaysia, and converse in Chinese Mandarin. I have taught and given research seminars in German, Italian, and French, in addition to English.