p453... Patterns are descriptive findings. Lots of respondents found this
Themes are more abstract than this, there is an element of interpretation. Lots of respondents found this... and I will label that group as this abstract theme.
Inductive analysis is about discovering patterns
Deductive analysis is when the data are analysed according to an existing framework.
Can i be inductive within the boundaries of a framework? Recognising that the questions and slant of interviews were influenced by a framework of prior knowledge and reading, but within that, attempting to let the story in the data emerge for themselves?
Grounded theory emphasises being immersed in the data - grounded - so that embedded meanings and relationships can emerge.
p454
Once patterns, themes and/or categories have been established thorugh inductive analysis, you can move to deductive analysis in testing and affirming the authenticity and appropriateness of the inductive content analysis. So, you can move from one to the other. I guess it is a form of triangulation. Looking at what you think you see from other perspectives
An "interplay of making inductions (deriving concepts, their properties and dimensions from data) and deductions (hypothesizing about the relationships between concepts) (Strauss and Corbin 1998, in Patton 2002)
HOWEVER
Analytic induction begins with an analyst's deduced propositions or theory-derived hypotheses and is a procedure for verifying theories and propositions based on qualitative data".
Nope, that's not what I'm doing. I'm using those propositions and hypotheses as a tool for exploring qualitative data, the conceptual model is a way of making a boundary so that there is an acceptably small amount of data to handle and already organised in some way, but not then verifying. Verifying to me means truth-checking and I am not doing that.
Later in the same paragraph however, it does seem more to describe what i want to do:
Sometimes [...] qualitative analysis is first deductive or quasi-deductive and then inductive as when, for example, the analyst begins by examining the data in terms of theory- derived sensitizing concepts or applying a theoretical framework developed by someone else [...] After or alongside this deductive phase of analysis, the researcher strives to look at the data afresh for undiscovered patterns and emergent undertandings (inductive analysis).
Inductive analysis is one of the primary characteristics of qualitative inquiry, so we need strategies for thinking and working inductively. Here are two:
1. identify, define and elucidate the categories developed by they people studied (emic)
2. seeing patterns that he people studied do not describe in their own terms, so the analyst develops them (etic)