Back to Basics: The Sequencing of Inductive and Deductive Research Methodologies in Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Research

A review of the literature in the field of fresh fruit and vegetable preferences in Australia reveals very little systematic study, with most investigations having been conducted by various public and private industry groups. Given the embryonic stage of research into fresh fruit and vegetable perceptions and choice, a particular program of research is warranted, with an emphasis on inductive processes progressing to deductive methods. This type of research is facilitated by relatively unstructured research methods. The data thus yielded can be subjected to deductive methods, which require a more experimental, structured research method, involving testing hypotheses that suggest themselves from the inductively-derived data. In this paper, these issues are discussed at length, and a word association study conducted by the author is described in order to illustrate the utility of combining a word association questionnaire with a demographics survey to produce a wealth of well ordered, easy to interpret inductive data.