I'm venting a bit in this post here. My Prof wants me to "have a look at data". 19 focus groups (a lot), semi-structured interviews focused around acceptability of an intervention, there were some pre-defined interview categories in mind, like intervention length, outcomes, mode of delivery, etc.

When asked whether go for deductive or inductive approach (i.e. whether I should look for matches between text and the interview guide categories, or rather code the text on my own and then later try to find overarching themes), my prof wouldn't provide a clear answer and instead told that I kind of need to do both at the same time, so we wouldn't lose information not fitting the interview guide categories. And also that data analysis should not be limited by our research aims, which sounds ridiculous to me! The goal seems to be to use the analysis to both inform an intervention acceptability study and to explore deeper processes tied to the disease the intervention is made for.

Please tell me, am I misunderstanding something about qual analysis? In my book, discussion of research aims comes first, then the analysis. And how am I supposed to do both the inductive and deductive approach at the same time, matching pre-determined categories and looking for new ones outside the working framework? I am not too skilled in qual, so it might be just my own ignorance, but I am confused and annoyed and starting to suspect my Prof of not knowing what they want.

Any constructive feedback is welcome, sources on parallel inductive/deductive approach especially, thanks!

Hello guys im starting a narrative review project, but i got one query.

When we are reading a review, do we cite the review or the original source from where the review wrote it from

Chatgpt and Claude tell me that I should cite original discoveries but for well established facts like " smoking causes lung cancer" I should just cite the review i got it from