Help! English is not my first language and I struggle to understand what an inductive argument is. My examiners say that arguments in my thesis are inductive. Is it a good or a bad thing. I have tried to google and define inductive but with so many definitions, I am not sure what my examiners mean. Thanks in advance!

It would be a good idea to run the feedback by your supervisor because these meanings can be tricky to interpret, and what your examiners are trying to tell you also might be difficult to interpret.

This is probably an oversimplification, but deduction is when you start out with a hypothesis (based on a theory), then collect data, then analyze the data to see if it supports or disproves your hypothesis. However if I start my study by collecting data, analyze the data, and only after analysis do I come up with a theory that explains the findings, then this is induction. In general, science is said to use deduction (the hypothetico-deductive method) but sometimes uses induction (e.g. grounded theory analysis). Maybe your examiners are saying that you are explaining your findings with post-hoc explanations that aren't based on your hypotheses? This would be the case if you started out with Theory A, the findings didn't fit, so you explained your findings by reference to Theory B. You may be perfectly justified in doing this, so I don't know whether your examiners are criticizing you for this or simply making an observation.

It's been a while since I learned about induction & deduction so I hope that all makes sense.