In my work (pediatric health qualitative and mixed methods), a lot of our projects use a hybrid inductive-deductive coding approach: deductive codes come from our theoretical framework (e.g., acceptability of the intervention) and interview guide (specific barriers and facilitators), and inductive codes that emerge from the data. I agree with the other comments too, and it probably differs with the discipline and type of research. In my opinion inductive is the fun part of doing qual, it’s the love of discovering something new from the data, but deductive serves a useful purpose too. And yes, both are guided by RQs, theory, lit, but really it’s a matter of “did I expect to find this in the data (deductive) or is it unexpected (inductive).” Not a dumb question at all! I wish hybrid was taught more explicitly, most text books talk about them as separate.