I'm going to be doing some qualitative work (mixed methods overall) and, because I will be interviewing members of a community that research has not been done on before, it is mostly exploratory. I'm not looking to come up with a theory or fit anything into a model....the purpose of the qualitative work is more to understand what residents see as issues within the community and to have a rich, thick description of community residents and their thoughts/attitudes around what is happening. I was looking into just a general inductive analysis method that just uses coming up with codes and then basically 3-8 themes within the research. I'm not going into it with preconceived notions - yes, there are research objectives, but that objective is to better understand residents' thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. I don't know that GT is necessarily the right choice from what I've read and, because it is very involved with initial line by line analysis and my research is mixed methods, I think it might be limited. Then I came across thematic analysis, which in a qual research book said is quite common in health research AND for topics that haven't really been explored before, so I was thinking maybe I should lean more towards thematic analysis. Pick out the main themes that come across from interviewing community residents and what they see as the main areas of concern in the community so this can then be used to inform the final part of my PhD and the recommendations.

What does anyone else think? What would you say to use for analysis and why? Thanks! :-)