Understanding abductive research method: Quote and ABCs
Quote on Abductive Research
The (abductive) method places a special emphasis on conducting informed exploratory studies that rely on a breadth of domains, procedures, populations, and analyses. This research approach has three benefits. First, it promotes the discovery of original theory in understudied domains. Second, the method encourages broad, boundary-expanding exploration, hence, has the potential to propose original theories that encompasses a large set of relationships. Third, the iterative nature of the method mitigates the inclusion of idiosyncratic construct relationships in the proposed theory. ~Janiszewski & van Osselaer [1]
ABCs of Abductive Reasoning
A: Assuming that the findings of any research work are limited, incomplete, conditional or open-ended for fresh exploration in the light of new evidences that may lead to better prediction of the reality and even to a new theory
B: Back-and-forth or non-linear processes of refining theory with fresh data, evidences, outcomes or variables
C: Contrasted to inductive or linear logical thinking based reasoning, abductive research looks for new puzzling or surprising facts or evidences to generate new theories or refine the existing ones through abductive inference or retroduction
Reference
[1} Chris Janiszewski, Stijn M. J. van Osselaer (2021). Abductive Theory Construction
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