limitations in thesis

How to Write Limitations of the Study (with examples)

This blog emphasizes the importance of recognizing and effectively writing about limitations in research. It discusses the types of limitations, their significance, and provides guidelines for writing about them, highlighting their role in advancing scholarly research.

Updated on August 24, 2023

No matter how well thought out, every research endeavor encounters challenges. There is simply no way to predict all possible variances throughout the process.

These uncharted boundaries and abrupt constraints are known as limitations in research . Identifying and acknowledging limitations is crucial for conducting rigorous studies. Limitations provide context and shed light on gaps in the prevailing inquiry and literature.

This article explores the importance of recognizing limitations and discusses how to write them effectively. By interpreting limitations in research and considering prevalent examples, we aim to reframe the perception from shameful mistakes to respectable revelations.

What are limitations in research?

In the clearest terms, research limitations are the practical or theoretical shortcomings of a study that are often outside of the researcher’s control . While these weaknesses limit the generalizability of a study’s conclusions, they also present a foundation for future research.

Sometimes limitations arise from tangible circumstances like time and funding constraints, or equipment and participant availability. Other times the rationale is more obscure and buried within the research design. Common types of limitations and their ramifications include:

• Theoretical: limits the scope, depth, or applicability of a study.
• Methodological: limits the quality, quantity, or diversity of the data.
• Empirical: limits the representativeness, validity, or reliability of the data.
• Analytical: limits the accuracy, completeness, or significance of the findings.
• Ethical: limits the access, consent, or confidentiality of the data.

Regardless of how, when, or why they arise, limitations are a natural part of the research process and should never be ignored . Like all other aspects, they are vital in their own purpose.

Why is identifying limitations important?

Whether to seek acceptance or avoid struggle, humans often instinctively hide flaws and mistakes. Merging this thought process into research by attempting to hide limitations, however, is a bad idea. It has the potential to negate the validity of outcomes and damage the reputation of scholars.

By identifying and addressing limitations throughout a project, researchers strengthen their arguments and curtail the chance of peer censure based on overlooked mistakes. Pointing out these flaws shows an understanding of variable limits and a scrupulous research process.

Showing awareness of and taking responsibility for a project’s boundaries and challenges validates the integrity and transparency of a researcher. It further demonstrates the researchers understand the applicable literature and have thoroughly evaluated their chosen research methods.

Presenting limitations also benefits the readers by providing context for research findings. It guides them to interpret the project’s conclusions only within the scope of very specific conditions. By allowing for an appropriate generalization of the findings that is accurately confined by research boundaries and is not too broad, limitations boost a study’s credibility .

Limitations are true assets to the research process. They highlight opportunities for future research. When researchers identify the limitations of their particular approach to a study question, they enable precise transferability and improve chances for reproducibility. 

Simply stating a project’s limitations is not adequate for spurring further research, though. To spark the interest of other researchers, these acknowledgements must come with thorough explanations regarding how the limitations affected the current study and how they can potentially be overcome with amended methods.

How to write limitations

Typically, the information about a study’s limitations is situated either at the beginning of the discussion section to provide context for readers or at the conclusion of the discussion section to acknowledge the need for further research. However, it varies depending upon the target journal or publication guidelines. 

Don’t hide your limitations

It is also important to not bury a limitation in the body of the paper unless it has a unique connection to a topic in that section. If so, it needs to be reiterated with the other limitations or at the conclusion of the discussion section. Wherever it is included in the manuscript, ensure that the limitations section is prominently positioned and clearly introduced.

While maintaining transparency by disclosing limitations means taking a comprehensive approach, it is not necessary to discuss everything that could have potentially gone wrong during the research study. If there is no commitment to investigation in the introduction, it is unnecessary to consider the issue a limitation to the research. Wholly consider the term ‘limitations’ and ask, “Did it significantly change or limit the possible outcomes?” Then, qualify the occurrence as either a limitation to include in the current manuscript or as an idea to note for other projects. 

Writing limitations

Once the limitations are concretely identified and it is decided where they will be included in the paper, researchers are ready for the writing task. Including only what is pertinent, keeping explanations detailed but concise, and employing the following guidelines is key for crafting valuable limitations:

1) Identify and describe the limitations : Clearly introduce the limitation by classifying its form and specifying its origin. For example:

• An unintentional bias encountered during data collection
• An intentional use of unplanned post-hoc data analysis

2) Explain the implications : Describe how the limitation potentially influences the study’s findings and how the validity and generalizability are subsequently impacted. Provide examples and evidence to support claims of the limitations’ effects without making excuses or exaggerating their impact. Overall, be transparent and objective in presenting the limitations, without undermining the significance of the research. 

3) Provide alternative approaches for future studies : Offer specific suggestions for potential improvements or avenues for further investigation. Demonstrate a proactive approach by encouraging future research that addresses the identified gaps and, therefore, expands the knowledge base.

Whether presenting limitations as an individual section within the manuscript or as a subtopic in the discussion area, authors should use clear headings and straightforward language to facilitate readability. There is no need to complicate limitations with jargon, computations, or complex datasets.

Examples of common limitations

Limitations are generally grouped into two categories , methodology and research process .

Methodology limitations

Methodology may include limitations due to:

• Sample size
• Lack of available or reliable data
• Lack of prior research studies on the topic
• Measure used to collect the data
• Self-reported data

The researcher is addressing how the large sample size requires a reassessment of the measures used to collect and analyze the data.

Research process limitations

Limitations during the research process may arise from:

• Access to information
• Longitudinal effects
• Cultural and other biases
• Language fluency
• Time constraints

The author is pointing out that the model’s estimates are based on potentially biased observational studies.

Final thoughts

Successfully proving theories and touting great achievements are only two very narrow goals of scholarly research. The true passion and greatest efforts of researchers comes more in the form of confronting assumptions and exploring the obscure.

In many ways, recognizing and sharing the limitations of a research study both allows for and encourages this type of discovery that continuously pushes research forward. By using limitations to provide a transparent account of the project's boundaries and to contextualize the findings, researchers pave the way for even more robust and impactful research in the future.

Charla Viera, MS

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How to Present the Limitations of the Study Examples

What are the limitations of a study?

The limitations of a study are the elements of methodology or study design that impact the interpretation of your research results. The limitations essentially detail any flaws or shortcomings in your study. Study limitations can exist due to constraints on research design, methodology, materials, etc., and these factors may impact the findings of your study. However, researchers are often reluctant to discuss the limitations of their study in their papers, feeling that bringing up limitations may undermine its research value in the eyes of readers and reviewers.

In spite of the impact it might have (and perhaps because of it) you should clearly acknowledge any limitations in your research paper in order to show readers—whether journal editors, other researchers, or the general public—that you are aware of these limitations and to explain how they affect the conclusions that can be drawn from the research.

In this article, we provide some guidelines for writing about research limitations, show examples of some frequently seen study limitations, and recommend techniques for presenting this information. And after you have finished drafting and have received manuscript editing for your work, you still might want to follow this up with academic editing before submitting your work to your target journal.

Why do I need to include limitations of research in my paper?

Although limitations address the potential weaknesses of a study, writing about them toward the end of your paper actually strengthens your study by identifying any problems before other researchers or reviewers find them.

Furthermore, pointing out study limitations shows that you’ve considered the impact of research weakness thoroughly and have an in-depth understanding of your research topic. Since all studies face limitations, being honest and detailing these limitations will impress researchers and reviewers more than ignoring them.

Where should I put the limitations of the study in my paper?

Some limitations might be evident to researchers before the start of the study, while others might become clear while you are conducting the research. Whether these limitations are anticipated or not, and whether they are due to research design or to methodology, they should be clearly identified and discussed in the discussion section —the final section of your paper. Most journals now require you to include a discussion of potential limitations of your work, and many journals now ask you to place this “limitations section” at the very end of your article. 

Some journals ask you to also discuss the strengths of your work in this section, and some allow you to freely choose where to include that information in your discussion section—make sure to always check the author instructions of your target journal before you finalize a manuscript and submit it for peer review .

Limitations of the Study Examples

There are several reasons why limitations of research might exist. The two main categories of limitations are those that result from the methodology and those that result from issues with the researcher(s).

Common Methodological Limitations of Studies

Limitations of research due to methodological problems can be addressed by clearly and directly identifying the potential problem and suggesting ways in which this could have been addressed—and SHOULD be addressed in future studies. The following are some major potential methodological issues that can impact the conclusions researchers can draw from the research.

Issues with research samples and selection

Sampling errors occur when a probability sampling method is used to select a sample, but that sample does not reflect the general population or appropriate population concerned. This results in limitations of your study known as “sample bias” or “selection bias.”

For example, if you conducted a survey to obtain your research results, your samples (participants) were asked to respond to the survey questions. However, you might have had limited ability to gain access to the appropriate type or geographic scope of participants. In this case, the people who responded to your survey questions may not truly be a random sample.

Insufficient sample size for statistical measurements

When conducting a study, it is important to have a sufficient sample size in order to draw valid conclusions. The larger the sample, the more precise your results will be. If your sample size is too small, it will be difficult to identify significant relationships in the data.

Normally, statistical tests require a larger sample size to ensure that the sample is considered representative of a population and that the statistical result can be generalized to a larger population. It is a good idea to understand how to choose an appropriate sample size before you conduct your research by using scientific calculation tools—in fact, many journals now require such estimation to be included in every manuscript that is sent out for review.

Lack of previous research studies on the topic

Citing and referencing prior research studies constitutes the basis of the literature review for your thesis or study, and these prior studies provide the theoretical foundations for the research question you are investigating. However, depending on the scope of your research topic, prior research studies that are relevant to your thesis might be limited.

When there is very little or no prior research on a specific topic, you may need to develop an entirely new research typology. In this case, discovering a limitation can be considered an important opportunity to identify literature gaps and to present the need for further development in the area of study.

Methods/instruments/techniques used to collect the data

After you complete your analysis of the research findings (in the discussion section), you might realize that the manner in which you have collected the data or the ways in which you have measured variables has limited your ability to conduct a thorough analysis of the results.

For example, you might realize that you should have addressed your survey questions from another viable perspective, or that you were not able to include an important question in the survey. In these cases, you should acknowledge the deficiency or deficiencies by stating a need for future researchers to revise their specific methods for collecting data that includes these missing elements.

Common Limitations of the Researcher(s)

Study limitations that arise from situations relating to the researcher or researchers (whether the direct fault of the individuals or not) should also be addressed and dealt with, and remedies to decrease these limitations—both hypothetically in your study, and practically in future studies—should be proposed.

Limited access to data

If your research involved surveying certain people or organizations, you might have faced the problem of having limited access to these respondents. Due to this limited access, you might need to redesign or restructure your research in a different way. In this case, explain the reasons for limited access and be sure that your finding is still reliable and valid despite this limitation.

Time constraints

Just as students have deadlines to turn in their class papers, academic researchers might also have to meet deadlines for submitting a manuscript to a journal or face other time constraints related to their research (e.g., participants are only available during a certain period; funding runs out; collaborators move to a new institution). The time available to study a research problem and to measure change over time might be constrained by such practical issues. If time constraints negatively impacted your study in any way, acknowledge this impact by mentioning a need for a future study (e.g., a longitudinal study) to answer this research problem.

Conflicts arising from cultural bias and other personal issues

Researchers might hold biased views due to their cultural backgrounds or perspectives of certain phenomena, and this can affect a study’s legitimacy. Also, it is possible that researchers will have biases toward data and results that only support their hypotheses or arguments. In order to avoid these problems, the author(s) of a study should examine whether the way the research problem was stated and the data-gathering process was carried out appropriately.

Steps for Organizing Your Study Limitations Section

When you discuss the limitations of your study, don’t simply list and describe your limitations—explain how these limitations have influenced your research findings. There might be multiple limitations in your study, but you only need to point out and explain those that directly relate to and impact how you address your research questions.

We suggest that you divide your limitations section into three steps: (1) identify the study limitations; (2) explain how they impact your study in detail; and (3) propose a direction for future studies and present alternatives. By following this sequence when discussing your study’s limitations, you will be able to clearly demonstrate your study’s weakness without undermining the quality and integrity of your research.

Step 1. Identify the limitation(s) of the study

• This part should comprise around 10%-20% of your discussion of study limitations.

The first step is to identify the particular limitation(s) that affected your study. There are many possible limitations of research that can affect your study, but you don’t need to write a long review of all possible study limitations. A 200-500 word critique is an appropriate length for a research limitations section. In the beginning of this section, identify what limitations your study has faced and how important these limitations are.

You only need to identify limitations that had the greatest potential impact on: (1) the quality of your findings, and (2) your ability to answer your research question.

Step 2. Explain these study limitations in detail

• This part should comprise around 60-70% of your discussion of limitations.

After identifying your research limitations, it’s time to explain the nature of the limitations and how they potentially impacted your study. For example, when you conduct quantitative research, a lack of probability sampling is an important issue that you should mention. On the other hand, when you conduct qualitative research, the inability to generalize the research findings could be an issue that deserves mention.

Explain the role these limitations played on the results and implications of the research and justify the choice you made in using this “limiting” methodology or other action in your research. Also, make sure that these limitations didn’t undermine the quality of your dissertation .

Step 3. Propose a direction for future studies and present alternatives (optional)

• This part should comprise around 10-20% of your discussion of limitations.

After acknowledging the limitations of the research, you need to discuss some possible ways to overcome these limitations in future studies. One way to do this is to present alternative methodologies and ways to avoid issues with, or “fill in the gaps of” the limitations of this study you have presented.  Discuss both the pros and cons of these alternatives and clearly explain why researchers should choose these approaches.

Make sure you are current on approaches used by prior studies and the impacts they have had on their findings. Cite review articles or scientific bodies that have recommended these approaches and why. This might be evidence in support of the approach you chose, or it might be the reason you consider your choices to be included as limitations. This process can act as a justification for your approach and a defense of your decision to take it while acknowledging the feasibility of other approaches.

P hrases and Tips for Introducing Your Study Limitations in the Discussion Section

The following phrases are frequently used to introduce the limitations of the study:

• “There may be some possible limitations in this study.”
• “The findings of this study have to be seen in light of some limitations.”
•  “The first is the…The second limitation concerns the…”
•  “The empirical results reported herein should be considered in the light of some limitations.”
• “This research, however, is subject to several limitations.”
• “The primary limitation to the generalization of these results is…”
• “Nonetheless, these results must be interpreted with caution and a number of limitations should be borne in mind.”
• “As with the majority of studies, the design of the current study is subject to limitations.”
• “There are two major limitations in this study that could be addressed in future research. First, the study focused on …. Second ….”

For more articles on research writing and the journal submissions and publication process, visit Wordvice’s Academic Resources page.

And be sure to receive professional English editing and proofreading services , including paper editing services , for your journal manuscript before submitting it to journal editors.

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Additional Resources

• Diving Deeper into Limitations and Delimitations (PhD student)
• Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper: Limitations of the Study (USC Library)
• Research Limitations (Research Methodology)
• How to Present Limitations and Alternatives (UMASS)

Article References

Pearson-Stuttard, J., Kypridemos, C., Collins, B., Mozaffarian, D., Huang, Y., Bandosz, P.,…Micha, R. (2018). Estimating the health and economic effects of the proposed US Food and Drug Administration voluntary sodium reformulation: Microsimulation cost-effectiveness analysis. PLOS. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002551

Xu, W.L, Pedersen, N.L., Keller, L., Kalpouzos, G., Wang, H.X., Graff, C,. Fratiglioni, L. (2015). HHEX_23 AA Genotype Exacerbates Effect of Diabetes on Dementia and Alzheimer Disease: A Population-Based Longitudinal Study. PLOS. Retrieved from https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001853

Writing Limitations of Research Study — 4 Reasons Why It Is Important!

It is not unusual for researchers to come across the term limitations of research during their academic paper writing. More often this is interpreted as something terrible. However, when it comes to research study, limitations can help structure the research study better. Therefore, do not underestimate significance of limitations of research study.

Allow us to take you through the context of how to evaluate the limits of your research and conclude an impactful relevance to your results.

Table of Contents

What Are the Limitations of a Research Study?

Every research has its limit and these limitations arise due to restrictions in methodology or research design.  This could impact your entire research or the research paper you wish to publish. Unfortunately, most researchers choose not to discuss their limitations of research fearing it will affect the value of their article in the eyes of readers.

However, it is very important to discuss your study limitations and show it to your target audience (other researchers, journal editors, peer reviewers etc.). It is very important that you provide an explanation of how your research limitations may affect the conclusions and opinions drawn from your research. Moreover, when as an author you state the limitations of research, it shows that you have investigated all the weaknesses of your study and have a deep understanding of the subject. Being honest could impress your readers and mark your study as a sincere effort in research.

Why and Where Should You Include the Research Limitations?

The main goal of your research is to address your research objectives. Conduct experiments, get results and explain those results, and finally justify your research question . It is best to mention the limitations of research in the discussion paragraph of your research article.

At the very beginning of this paragraph, immediately after highlighting the strengths of the research methodology, you should write down your limitations. You can discuss specific points from your research limitations as suggestions for further research in the conclusion of your thesis.

1. Common Limitations of the Researchers

Limitations that are related to the researcher must be mentioned. This will help you gain transparency with your readers. Furthermore, you could provide suggestions on decreasing these limitations in you and your future studies.

2. Limited Access to Information

Your work may involve some institutions and individuals in research, and sometimes you may have problems accessing these institutions. Therefore, you need to redesign and rewrite your work. You must explain your readers the reason for limited access.

3. Limited Time

All researchers are bound by their deadlines when it comes to completing their studies. Sometimes, time constraints can affect your research negatively. However, the best practice is to acknowledge it and mention a requirement for future study to solve the research problem in a better way.

4. Conflict over Biased Views and Personal Issues

Biased views can affect the research. In fact, researchers end up choosing only those results and data that support their main argument, keeping aside the other loose ends of the research.

Types of Limitations of Research

Before beginning your research study, know that there are certain limitations to what you are testing or possible research results. There are different types that researchers may encounter, and they all have unique characteristics, such as:

1. Research Design Limitations

Certain restrictions on your research or available procedures may affect your final results or research outputs. You may have formulated research goals and objectives too broadly. However, this can help you understand how you can narrow down the formulation of research goals and objectives, thereby increasing the focus of your study.

2. Impact Limitations

Even if your research has excellent statistics and a strong design, it can suffer from the influence of the following factors:

• Presence of increasing findings as researched
• Being population specific
• A strong regional focus.

3. Data or statistical limitations

In some cases, it is impossible to collect sufficient data for research or very difficult to get access to the data. This could lead to incomplete conclusion to your study. Moreover, this insufficiency in data could be the outcome of your study design. The unclear, shabby research outline could produce more problems in interpreting your findings.

How to Correctly Structure Your Research Limitations?

There are strict guidelines for narrowing down research questions, wherein you could justify and explain potential weaknesses of your academic paper. You could go through these basic steps to get a well-structured clarity of research limitations:

• Declare that you wish to identify your limitations of research and explain their importance,
• Provide the necessary depth, explain their nature, and justify your study choices.
• Write how you are suggesting that it is possible to overcome them in the future.

In this section, your readers will see that you are aware of the potential weaknesses in your business, understand them and offer effective solutions, and it will positively strengthen your article as you clarify all limitations of research to your target audience.

Know that you cannot be perfect and there is no individual without flaws. You could use the limitations of research as a great opportunity to take on a new challenge and improve the future of research. In a typical academic paper, research limitations may relate to:

1. Formulating your goals and objectives

If you formulate goals and objectives too broadly, your work will have some shortcomings. In this case, specify effective methods or ways to narrow down the formula of goals and aim to increase your level of study focus.

2. Application of your data collection methods in research

If you do not have experience in primary data collection, there is a risk that there will be flaws in the implementation of your methods. It is necessary to accept this, and learn and educate yourself to understand data collection methods.

3. Sample sizes

This depends on the nature of problem you choose. Sample size is of a greater importance in quantitative studies as opposed to qualitative ones. If your sample size is too small, statistical tests cannot identify significant relationships or connections within a given data set.

You could point out that other researchers should base the same study on a larger sample size to get more accurate results.

4. The absence of previous studies in the field you have chosen

Writing a literature review is an important step in any scientific study because it helps researchers determine the scope of current work in the chosen field. It is a major foundation for any researcher who must use them to achieve a set of specific goals or objectives.

However, if you are focused on the most current and evolving research problem or a very narrow research problem, there may be very little prior research on your topic. For example, if you chose to explore the role of Bitcoin as the currency of the future, you may not find tons of scientific papers addressing the research problem as Bitcoins are only a new phenomenon.

It is important that you learn to identify research limitations examples at each step. Whatever field you choose, feel free to add the shortcoming of your work. This is mainly because you do not have many years of experience writing scientific papers or completing complex work. Therefore, the depth and scope of your discussions may be compromised at different levels compared to academics with a lot of expertise. Include specific points from limitations of research. Use them as suggestions for the future.

Have you ever faced a challenge of writing the limitations of research study in your paper? How did you overcome it? What ways did you follow? Were they beneficial? Let us know in the comments below!

Frequently Asked Questions

Setting limitations in our study helps to clarify the outcomes drawn from our research and enhance understanding of the subject. Moreover, it shows that the author has investigated all the weaknesses in the study.

Scope is the range and limitations of a research project which are set to define the boundaries of a project. Limitations are the impacts on the overall study due to the constraints on the research design.

Limitation in research is an impact of a constraint on the research design in the overall study. They are the flaws or weaknesses in the study, which may influence the outcome of the research.

1. Limitations in research can be written as follows: Formulate your goals and objectives 2. Analyze the chosen data collection method and the sample sizes 3. Identify your limitations of research and explain their importance 4. Provide the necessary depth, explain their nature, and justify your study choices 5. Write how you are suggesting that it is possible to overcome them in the future

Excellent article ,,,it has helped me big

This is very helpful information. It has given me an insight on how to go about my study limitations.

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The limitations of the study are those characteristics of design or methodology that impacted or influenced the interpretation of the findings from your research. Study limitations are the constraints placed on the ability to generalize from the results, to further describe applications to practice, and/or related to the utility of findings that are the result of the ways in which you initially chose to design the study or the method used to establish internal and external validity or the result of unanticipated challenges that emerged during the study.

Price, James H. and Judy Murnan. “Research Limitations and the Necessity of Reporting Them.” American Journal of Health Education 35 (2004): 66-67; Theofanidis, Dimitrios and Antigoni Fountouki. "Limitations and Delimitations in the Research Process." Perioperative Nursing 7 (September-December 2018): 155-163. .

Importance of...

Always acknowledge a study's limitations. It is far better that you identify and acknowledge your study’s limitations than to have them pointed out by your professor and have your grade lowered because you appeared to have ignored them or didn't realize they existed.

Keep in mind that acknowledgment of a study's limitations is an opportunity to make suggestions for further research. If you do connect your study's limitations to suggestions for further research, be sure to explain the ways in which these unanswered questions may become more focused because of your study.

Acknowledgment of a study's limitations also provides you with opportunities to demonstrate that you have thought critically about the research problem, understood the relevant literature published about it, and correctly assessed the methods chosen for studying the problem. A key objective of the research process is not only discovering new knowledge but also to confront assumptions and explore what we don't know.

Claiming limitations is a subjective process because you must evaluate the impact of those limitations . Don't just list key weaknesses and the magnitude of a study's limitations. To do so diminishes the validity of your research because it leaves the reader wondering whether, or in what ways, limitation(s) in your study may have impacted the results and conclusions. Limitations require a critical, overall appraisal and interpretation of their impact. You should answer the question: do these problems with errors, methods, validity, etc. eventually matter and, if so, to what extent?

Price, James H. and Judy Murnan. “Research Limitations and the Necessity of Reporting Them.” American Journal of Health Education 35 (2004): 66-67; Structure: How to Structure the Research Limitations Section of Your Dissertation. Dissertations and Theses: An Online Textbook. Laerd.com.

Descriptions of Possible Limitations

All studies have limitations . However, it is important that you restrict your discussion to limitations related to the research problem under investigation. For example, if a meta-analysis of existing literature is not a stated purpose of your research, it should not be discussed as a limitation. Do not apologize for not addressing issues that you did not promise to investigate in the introduction of your paper.

Here are examples of limitations related to methodology and the research process you may need to describe and discuss how they possibly impacted your results. Note that descriptions of limitations should be stated in the past tense because they were discovered after you completed your research.

Possible Methodological Limitations

• Sample size -- the number of the units of analysis you use in your study is dictated by the type of research problem you are investigating. Note that, if your sample size is too small, it will be difficult to find significant relationships from the data, as statistical tests normally require a larger sample size to ensure a representative distribution of the population and to be considered representative of groups of people to whom results will be generalized or transferred. Note that sample size is generally less relevant in qualitative research if explained in the context of the research problem.
• Lack of available and/or reliable data -- a lack of data or of reliable data will likely require you to limit the scope of your analysis, the size of your sample, or it can be a significant obstacle in finding a trend and a meaningful relationship. You need to not only describe these limitations but provide cogent reasons why you believe data is missing or is unreliable. However, don’t just throw up your hands in frustration; use this as an opportunity to describe a need for future research based on designing a different method for gathering data.
• Lack of prior research studies on the topic -- citing prior research studies forms the basis of your literature review and helps lay a foundation for understanding the research problem you are investigating. Depending on the currency or scope of your research topic, there may be little, if any, prior research on your topic. Before assuming this to be true, though, consult with a librarian! In cases when a librarian has confirmed that there is little or no prior research, you may be required to develop an entirely new research typology [for example, using an exploratory rather than an explanatory research design ]. Note again that discovering a limitation can serve as an important opportunity to identify new gaps in the literature and to describe the need for further research.
• Measure used to collect the data -- sometimes it is the case that, after completing your interpretation of the findings, you discover that the way in which you gathered data inhibited your ability to conduct a thorough analysis of the results. For example, you regret not including a specific question in a survey that, in retrospect, could have helped address a particular issue that emerged later in the study. Acknowledge the deficiency by stating a need for future researchers to revise the specific method for gathering data.
• Self-reported data -- whether you are relying on pre-existing data or you are conducting a qualitative research study and gathering the data yourself, self-reported data is limited by the fact that it rarely can be independently verified. In other words, you have to the accuracy of what people say, whether in interviews, focus groups, or on questionnaires, at face value. However, self-reported data can contain several potential sources of bias that you should be alert to and note as limitations. These biases become apparent if they are incongruent with data from other sources. These are: (1) selective memory [remembering or not remembering experiences or events that occurred at some point in the past]; (2) telescoping [recalling events that occurred at one time as if they occurred at another time]; (3) attribution [the act of attributing positive events and outcomes to one's own agency, but attributing negative events and outcomes to external forces]; and, (4) exaggeration [the act of representing outcomes or embellishing events as more significant than is actually suggested from other data].

Possible Limitations of the Researcher

• Access -- if your study depends on having access to people, organizations, data, or documents and, for whatever reason, access is denied or limited in some way, the reasons for this needs to be described. Also, include an explanation why being denied or limited access did not prevent you from following through on your study.
• Longitudinal effects -- unlike your professor, who can literally devote years [even a lifetime] to studying a single topic, the time available to investigate a research problem and to measure change or stability over time is constrained by the due date of your assignment. Be sure to choose a research problem that does not require an excessive amount of time to complete the literature review, apply the methodology, and gather and interpret the results. If you're unsure whether you can complete your research within the confines of the assignment's due date, talk to your professor.
• Cultural and other type of bias -- we all have biases, whether we are conscience of them or not. Bias is when a person, place, event, or thing is viewed or shown in a consistently inaccurate way. Bias is usually negative, though one can have a positive bias as well, especially if that bias reflects your reliance on research that only support your hypothesis. When proof-reading your paper, be especially critical in reviewing how you have stated a problem, selected the data to be studied, what may have been omitted, the manner in which you have ordered events, people, or places, how you have chosen to represent a person, place, or thing, to name a phenomenon, or to use possible words with a positive or negative connotation. NOTE :   If you detect bias in prior research, it must be acknowledged and you should explain what measures were taken to avoid perpetuating that bias. For example, if a previous study only used boys to examine how music education supports effective math skills, describe how your research expands the study to include girls.
• Fluency in a language -- if your research focuses , for example, on measuring the perceived value of after-school tutoring among Mexican-American ESL [English as a Second Language] students and you are not fluent in Spanish, you are limited in being able to read and interpret Spanish language research studies on the topic or to speak with these students in their primary language. This deficiency should be acknowledged.

Aguinis, Hermam and Jeffrey R. Edwards. “Methodological Wishes for the Next Decade and How to Make Wishes Come True.” Journal of Management Studies 51 (January 2014): 143-174; Brutus, Stéphane et al. "Self-Reported Limitations and Future Directions in Scholarly Reports: Analysis and Recommendations." Journal of Management 39 (January 2013): 48-75; Senunyeme, Emmanuel K. Business Research Methods. Powerpoint Presentation. Regent University of Science and Technology; ter Riet, Gerben et al. “All That Glitters Isn't Gold: A Survey on Acknowledgment of Limitations in Biomedical Studies.” PLOS One 8 (November 2013): 1-6.

Structure and Writing Style

Information about the limitations of your study are generally placed either at the beginning of the discussion section of your paper so the reader knows and understands the limitations before reading the rest of your analysis of the findings, or, the limitations are outlined at the conclusion of the discussion section as an acknowledgement of the need for further study. Statements about a study's limitations should not be buried in the body [middle] of the discussion section unless a limitation is specific to something covered in that part of the paper. If this is the case, though, the limitation should be reiterated at the conclusion of the section.

If you determine that your study is seriously flawed due to important limitations , such as, an inability to acquire critical data, consider reframing it as an exploratory study intended to lay the groundwork for a more complete research study in the future. Be sure, though, to specifically explain the ways that these flaws can be successfully overcome in a new study.

But, do not use this as an excuse for not developing a thorough research paper! Review the tab in this guide for developing a research topic . If serious limitations exist, it generally indicates a likelihood that your research problem is too narrowly defined or that the issue or event under study is too recent and, thus, very little research has been written about it. If serious limitations do emerge, consult with your professor about possible ways to overcome them or how to revise your study.

When discussing the limitations of your research, be sure to:

• Describe each limitation in detailed but concise terms;
• Explain why each limitation exists;
• Provide the reasons why each limitation could not be overcome using the method(s) chosen to acquire or gather the data [cite to other studies that had similar problems when possible];
• Assess the impact of each limitation in relation to the overall findings and conclusions of your study; and,
• If appropriate, describe how these limitations could point to the need for further research.

Remember that the method you chose may be the source of a significant limitation that has emerged during your interpretation of the results [for example, you didn't interview a group of people that you later wish you had]. If this is the case, don't panic. Acknowledge it, and explain how applying a different or more robust methodology might address the research problem more effectively in a future study. A underlying goal of scholarly research is not only to show what works, but to demonstrate what doesn't work or what needs further clarification.

Aguinis, Hermam and Jeffrey R. Edwards. “Methodological Wishes for the Next Decade and How to Make Wishes Come True.” Journal of Management Studies 51 (January 2014): 143-174; Brutus, Stéphane et al. "Self-Reported Limitations and Future Directions in Scholarly Reports: Analysis and Recommendations." Journal of Management 39 (January 2013): 48-75; Ioannidis, John P.A. "Limitations are not Properly Acknowledged in the Scientific Literature." Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 60 (2007): 324-329; Pasek, Josh. Writing the Empirical Social Science Research Paper: A Guide for the Perplexed. January 24, 2012. Academia.edu; Structure: How to Structure the Research Limitations Section of Your Dissertation. Dissertations and Theses: An Online Textbook. Laerd.com; What Is an Academic Paper? Institute for Writing Rhetoric. Dartmouth College; Writing the Experimental Report: Methods, Results, and Discussion. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University.

Writing Tip

Don't Inflate the Importance of Your Findings!

After all the hard work and long hours devoted to writing your research paper, it is easy to get carried away with attributing unwarranted importance to what you’ve done. We all want our academic work to be viewed as excellent and worthy of a good grade, but it is important that you understand and openly acknowledge the limitations of your study. Inflating the importance of your study's findings could be perceived by your readers as an attempt hide its flaws or encourage a biased interpretation of the results. A small measure of humility goes a long way!

Another Writing Tip

Negative Results are Not a Limitation!

Negative evidence refers to findings that unexpectedly challenge rather than support your hypothesis. If you didn't get the results you anticipated, it may mean your hypothesis was incorrect and needs to be reformulated. Or, perhaps you have stumbled onto something unexpected that warrants further study. Moreover, the absence of an effect may be very telling in many situations, particularly in experimental research designs. In any case, your results may very well be of importance to others even though they did not support your hypothesis. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that results contrary to what you expected is a limitation to your study. If you carried out the research well, they are simply your results and only require additional interpretation.

Lewis, George H. and Jonathan F. Lewis. “The Dog in the Night-Time: Negative Evidence in Social Research.” The British Journal of Sociology 31 (December 1980): 544-558.

Yet Another Writing Tip

Sample Size Limitations in Qualitative Research

Sample sizes are typically smaller in qualitative research because, as the study goes on, acquiring more data does not necessarily lead to more information. This is because one occurrence of a piece of data, or a code, is all that is necessary to ensure that it becomes part of the analysis framework. However, it remains true that sample sizes that are too small cannot adequately support claims of having achieved valid conclusions and sample sizes that are too large do not permit the deep, naturalistic, and inductive analysis that defines qualitative inquiry. Determining adequate sample size in qualitative research is ultimately a matter of judgment and experience in evaluating the quality of the information collected against the uses to which it will be applied and the particular research method and purposeful sampling strategy employed. If the sample size is found to be a limitation, it may reflect your judgment about the methodological technique chosen [e.g., single life history study versus focus group interviews] rather than the number of respondents used.

Boddy, Clive Roland. "Sample Size for Qualitative Research." Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal 19 (2016): 426-432; Huberman, A. Michael and Matthew B. Miles. "Data Management and Analysis Methods." In Handbook of Qualitative Research . Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), pp. 428-444; Blaikie, Norman. "Confounding Issues Related to Determining Sample Size in Qualitative Research." International Journal of Social Research Methodology 21 (2018): 635-641; Oppong, Steward Harrison. "The Problem of Sampling in qualitative Research." Asian Journal of Management Sciences and Education 2 (2013): 202-210.

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How to structure the Research Limitations section of your dissertation

There is no "one best way" to structure the Research Limitations section of your dissertation. However, we recommend a structure based on three moves : the announcing , reflecting and forward looking move. The announcing move immediately allows you to identify the limitations of your dissertation and explain how important each of these limitations is. The reflecting move provides greater depth, helping to explain the nature of the limitations and justify the choices that you made during the research process. Finally, the forward looking move enables you to suggest how such limitations could be overcome in future. The collective aim of these three moves is to help you walk the reader through your Research Limitations section in a succinct and structured way. This will make it clear to the reader that you recognise the limitations of your own research, that you understand why such factors are limitations, and can point to ways of combating these limitations if future research was carried out. This article explains what should be included in each of these three moves :

• THE ANNOUNCING MOVE: Identifying limitations and explaining how important they are
• THE REFLECTING MOVE: Explaining the nature of the limitations and justifying the choices you made
• THE FORWARD LOOKING MOVE: Suggesting how such limitations could be overcome in future

THE ANNOUNCING MOVE Identifying limitations, and explaining how important they are

There are many possible limitations that your research may have faced. However, is not necessary for you to discuss all of these limitations in your Research Limitations section. After all, you are not writing a 2000 word critical review of the limitations of your dissertation, just a 200-500 word critique that is only one section long (i.e., the Research Limitations section within your Conclusions chapter). Therefore, in this first announcing move , we would recommend that you identify only those limitations that had the greatest potential impact on: (a) the quality of your findings; and (b) your ability to effectively answer your research questions and/or hypotheses.

We use the word potential impact because we often do not know the degree to which different factors limited our findings or our ability to effectively answer our research questions and/or hypotheses. For example, we know that when adopting a quantitative research design, a failure to use a probability sampling technique significantly limits our ability to make broader generalisations from our results (i.e., our ability to make statistical inferences from our sample to the population being studied). However, the degree to which this reduces the quality of our findings is a matter of debate. Also, whilst the lack of a probability sampling technique when using a quantitative research design is a very obvious example of a research limitation, other limitations are far less clear. Therefore, the key point is to focus on those limitations that you feel had the greatest impact on your findings, as well as your ability to effectively answer your research questions and/or hypotheses.

Overall, the announcing move should be around 10-20% of the total word count of the Research Limitations section.

THE REFLECTING MOVE Explaining the nature of the limitations and justifying the choices you made

Having identified the most important limitations to your dissertation in the announcing move , the reflecting move focuses on explaining the nature of these limitations and justifying the choices that you made during the research process. This part should be around 60-70% of the total word count of the Research Limitations section.

It is important to remember at this stage that all research suffers from limitations, whether it is performed by undergraduate and master's level dissertation students, or seasoned academics. Acknowledging such limitations should not be viewed as a weakness, highlighting to the person marking your work the reasons why you should receive a lower grade. Instead, the reader is more likely to accept that you recognise the limitations of your own research if you write a high quality reflecting move . This is because explaining the limitations of your research and justifying the choices you made during the dissertation process demonstrates the command that you had over your research.

We talk about explaining the nature of the limitations in your dissertation because such limitations are highly research specific. Let's take the example of potential limitations to your sampling strategy. Whilst you may have a number of potential limitations in sampling strategy, let's focus on the lack of probability sampling ; that is, of all the different types of sampling technique that you could have used [see Types of probability sampling and Types of non-probability sampling ], you choose not to use a probability sampling technique (e.g., simple random sampling , systematic random sampling , stratified random sampling ). As mentioned, if you used a quantitative research design in your dissertation, the lack of probability sampling is an important, obvious limitation to your research. This is because it prevents you from making generalisations about the population you are studying (e.g. Facebook usage at a single university of 20,000 students) from the data you have collected (e.g., a survey of 400 students at the same university). Since an important component of quantitative research is such generalisation, this is a clear limitation. However, the lack of a probability sampling technique is not viewed as a limitation if you used a qualitative research design. In qualitative research designs, a non-probability sampling technique is typically selected over a probability sampling technique.

And this is just part of the puzzle?

Even if you used a quantitative research design, but failed to employ a probability sampling technique, there are still many perfectly justifiable reasons why you could have made such a choice. For example, it may have been impossible (or near on impossible) to get a list of the population you were studying (e.g., a list of all the 20,000 students at the single university you were interested in). Since probability sampling is only possible when we have such a list, the lack of such a list or inability to attain such a list is a perfectly justifiable reason for not using a probability sampling technique; even if such a technique is the ideal.

As such, the purpose of all the guides we have written on research limitations is to help you: (a) explain the nature of the limitations in your dissertation; and (b) justify the choices you made.

In helping you to justifying the choices that you made, these articles explain not only when something is, in theory , an obvious limitation, but how, in practice , such a limitation was not necessarily so damaging to the quality of your dissertation. This should significantly strengthen the quality of your Research Limitations section.

THE FORWARD LOOKING MOVE Suggesting how such limitations could be overcome in future

Finally, the forward looking move builds on the reflecting move by suggesting how the limitations you have discuss could be overcome through future research. Whilst a lot could be written in this part of the Research Limitations section, we would recommend that it is only around 10-20% of the total word count for this section.

Stating the Obvious: Writing Assumptions, Limitations, and Delimitations

During the process of writing your thesis or dissertation, you might suddenly realize that your research has inherent flaws. Don’t worry! Virtually all projects contain restrictions to your research. However, being able to recognize and accurately describe these problems is the difference between a true researcher and a grade-school kid with a science-fair project. Concerns with truthful responding, access to participants, and survey instruments are just a few of examples of restrictions on your research. In the following sections, the differences among delimitations, limitations, and assumptions of a dissertation will be clarified.

Delimitations

Delimitations are the definitions you set as the boundaries of your own thesis or dissertation, so delimitations are in your control. Delimitations are set so that your goals do not become impossibly large to complete. Examples of delimitations include objectives, research questions, variables, theoretical objectives that you have adopted, and populations chosen as targets to study. When you are stating your delimitations, clearly inform readers why you chose this course of study. The answer might simply be that you were curious about the topic and/or wanted to improve standards of a professional field by revealing certain findings. In any case, you should clearly list the other options available and the reasons why you did not choose these options immediately after you list your delimitations. You might have avoided these options for reasons of practicality, interest, or relativity to the study at hand. For example, you might have only studied Hispanic mothers because they have the highest rate of obese babies. Delimitations are often strongly related to your theory and research questions. If you were researching whether there are different parenting styles between unmarried Asian, Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic women, then a delimitation of your study would be the inclusion of only participants with those demographics and the exclusion of participants from other demographics such as men, married women, and all other ethnicities of single women (inclusion and exclusion criteria). A further delimitation might be that you only included closed-ended Likert scale responses in the survey, rather than including additional open-ended responses, which might make some people more willing to take and complete your survey. Remember that delimitations are not good or bad. They are simply a detailed description of the scope of interest for your study as it relates to the research design. Don’t forget to describe the philosophical framework you used throughout your study, which also delimits your study.

Limitations

Limitations of a dissertation are potential weaknesses in your study that are mostly out of your control, given limited funding, choice of research design, statistical model constraints, or other factors. In addition, a limitation is a restriction on your study that cannot be reasonably dismissed and can affect your design and results. Do not worry about limitations because limitations affect virtually all research projects, as well as most things in life. Even when you are going to your favorite restaurant, you are limited by the menu choices. If you went to a restaurant that had a menu that you were craving, you might not receive the service, price, or location that makes you enjoy your favorite restaurant. If you studied participants’ responses to a survey, you might be limited in your abilities to gain the exact type or geographic scope of participants you wanted. The people whom you managed to get to take your survey may not truly be a random sample, which is also a limitation. If you used a common test for data findings, your results are limited by the reliability of the test. If your study was limited to a certain amount of time, your results are affected by the operations of society during that time period (e.g., economy, social trends). It is important for you to remember that limitations of a dissertation are often not something that can be solved by the researcher. Also, remember that whatever limits you also limits other researchers, whether they are the largest medical research companies or consumer habits corporations. Certain kinds of limitations are often associated with the analytical approach you take in your research, too. For example, some qualitative methods like heuristics or phenomenology do not lend themselves well to replicability. Also, most of the commonly used quantitative statistical models can only determine correlation, but not causation.

Assumptions

Assumptions are things that are accepted as true, or at least plausible, by researchers and peers who will read your dissertation or thesis. In other words, any scholar reading your paper will assume that certain aspects of your study is true given your population, statistical test, research design, or other delimitations. For example, if you tell your friend that your favorite restaurant is an Italian place, your friend will assume that you don’t go there for the sushi. It’s assumed that you go there to eat Italian food. Because most assumptions are not discussed in-text, assumptions that are discussed in-text are discussed in the context of the limitations of your study, which is typically in the discussion section. This is important, because both assumptions and limitations affect the inferences you can draw from your study. One of the more common assumptions made in survey research is the assumption of honesty and truthful responses. However, for certain sensitive questions this assumption may be more difficult to accept, in which case it would be described as a limitation of the study. For example, asking people to report their criminal behavior in a survey may not be as reliable as asking people to report their eating habits. It is important to remember that your limitations and assumptions should not contradict one another. For instance, if you state that generalizability is a limitation of your study given that your sample was limited to one city in the United States, then you should not claim generalizability to the United States population as an assumption of your study. Statistical models in quantitative research designs are accompanied with assumptions as well, some more strict than others. These assumptions generally refer to the characteristics of the data, such as distributions, correlational trends, and variable type, just to name a few. Violating these assumptions can lead to drastically invalid results, though this often depends on sample size and other considerations.

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Research Limitations & Delimitations

What they are and how they’re different (with examples)

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) | Expert Reviewed By: David Phair (PhD) | September 2022

If you’re new to the world of research, you’ve probably heard the terms “ research limitations ” and “ research delimitations ” being thrown around, often quite loosely. In this post, we’ll unpack what both of these mean, how they’re similar and how they’re different – so that you can write up these sections the right way.

Overview: Limitations vs Delimitations

• Are they the same?
• What are research limitations
• What are research delimitations
• Limitations vs delimitations

First things first…

Let’s start with the most important takeaway point of this post – research limitations and research delimitations are not the same – but they are related to each other (we’ll unpack that a little later). So, if you hear someone using these two words interchangeably, be sure to share this post with them!

Research Limitations

Research limitations are, at the simplest level, the weaknesses of the study, based on factors that are often outside of your control as the researcher. These factors could include things like time , access to funding, equipment , data or participants . For example, if you weren’t able to access a random sample of participants for your study and had to adopt a convenience sampling strategy instead, that would impact the generalizability of your findings and therefore reflect a limitation of your study.

Research limitations can also emerge from the research design itself . For example, if you were undertaking a correlational study, you wouldn’t be able to infer causality (since correlation doesn’t mean certain causation). Similarly, if you utilised online surveys to collect data from your participants, you naturally wouldn’t be able to get the same degree of rich data that you would from in-person interviews .

Simply put, research limitations reflect the shortcomings of a study , based on practical (or theoretical) constraints that the researcher faced. These shortcomings limit what you can conclude from a study, but at the same time, present a foundation for future research . Importantly, all research has limitations , so there’s no need to hide anything here – as long as you discuss how the limitations might affect your findings, it’s all good.

Research Delimitations

Alright, now that we’ve unpacked the limitations, let’s move on to the delimitations .

Research delimitations are similar to limitations in that they also “ limit ” the study, but their focus is entirely different. Specifically, the delimitations of a study refer to the scope of the research aims and research questions . In other words, delimitations reflect the choices you, as the researcher, intentionally make in terms of what you will and won’t try to achieve with your study. In other words, what your research aims and research questions will and won’t include.

As we’ve spoken about many times before, it’s important to have a tight, narrow focus for your research, so that you can dive deeply into your topic, apply your energy to one specific area and develop meaningful insights. If you have an overly broad scope or unfocused topic, your research will often pull in multiple, even opposing directions, and you’ll just land up with a muddy mess of findings .

So, the delimitations section is where you’ll clearly state what your research aims and research questions will focus on – and just as importantly, what they will exclude . For example, you might investigate a widespread phenomenon, but choose to focus your study on a specific age group, ethnicity or gender. Similarly, your study may focus exclusively on one country, city or even organization. As long as the scope is well justified (in other words, it represents a novel, valuable research topic), this is perfectly acceptable – in fact, it’s essential. Remember, focus is your friend.

Need a helping hand?

Conclusion: Limitations vs Delimitations

Ok, so let’s recap.

Research limitations and research delimitations are related in that they both refer to “limits” within a study. But, they are distinctly different. Limitations reflect the shortcomings of your study, based on practical or theoretical constraints that you faced.

Contrasted to that, delimitations reflect the choices that you made in terms of the focus and scope of your research aims and research questions. If you want to learn more about research aims and questions, you can check out this video post , where we unpack those concepts in detail.

Psst… there’s more (for free)

This post is part of our dissertation mini-course, which covers everything you need to get started with your dissertation, thesis or research project. 

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17 Comments

Good clarification of ideas on how a researcher ought to do during Process of choice

Thank you so much for this very simple but explicit explanation on limitation and delimitation. It has so helped me to develop my masters proposal. hope to recieve more from your site as time progresses

Thank you for this explanation – very clear.

Thanks for the explanation, really got it well.

This website is really helpful for my masters proposal

Thank you very much for helping to explain these two terms

I spent almost the whole day trying to figure out the differences

when I came across your notes everything became very clear

thanks for the clearly outlined explanation on the two terms, limitation and delimitation.

Very helpful Many thanks 🙏

Excellent it resolved my conflict .

I would like you to assist me please. If in my Research, I interviewed some participants and I submitted Questionnaires to other participants to answered to the questions, in the same organization, Is this a Qualitative methodology , a Quantitative Methodology or is it a Mixture Methodology I have used in my research? Please help me

How do I cite this article in APA format

Really so great ,finally have understood it’s difference now

Getting more clear regarding Limitations and Delimitation and concepts

I really appreciate your apt and precise explanation of the two concepts namely ; Limitations and Delimitations.

thank you for this, very helpful to researchers

Very good explained

Great and clear explanation, after a long confusion period on the two words, i can now explain to someone with ease.

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Organizing Academic Research Papers: Limitations of the Study

• Purpose of Guide
• Design Flaws to Avoid
• Glossary of Research Terms
• Narrowing a Topic Idea
• Broadening a Topic Idea
• Extending the Timeliness of a Topic Idea
• Academic Writing Style
• Choosing a Title
• Making an Outline
• Paragraph Development
• Executive Summary
• Background Information
• The Research Problem/Question
• Theoretical Framework
• Citation Tracking
• Content Alert Services
• Evaluating Sources
• Primary Sources
• Secondary Sources
• Tertiary Sources
• What Is Scholarly vs. Popular?
• Qualitative Methods
• Quantitative Methods
• Using Non-Textual Elements
• Limitations of the Study
• Common Grammar Mistakes
• Avoiding Plagiarism
• Footnotes or Endnotes?
• Further Readings
• Annotated Bibliography
• Dealing with Nervousness
• Using Visual Aids
• Grading Someone Else's Paper
• How to Manage Group Projects
• Multiple Book Review Essay
• Reviewing Collected Essays
• About Informed Consent
• Writing Field Notes
• Writing a Policy Memo
• Writing a Research Proposal
• Acknowledgements

The limitations of the study are those characteristics of design or methodology that impacted or influenced the application or interpretation of the results of your study. They are the constraints on generalizability and utility of findings that are the result of the ways in which you chose to design the study and/or the method used to establish internal and external validity.

Importance of...

Always acknowledge a study's limitations. It is far better for you to identify and acknowledge your study’s limitations than to have them pointed out by your professor and be graded down because you appear to have ignored them.

Keep in mind that acknowledgement of a study's limitations is an opportunity to make suggestions for further research. If you do connect your study's limitations to suggestions for further research, be sure to explain the ways in which these unanswered questions may become more focused because of your study.

Acknowledgement of a study's limitations also provides you with an opportunity to demonstrate to your professor that you have thought critically about the research problem, understood the relevant literature published about it, and correctly assessed the methods chosen for studying the problem. A key objective of the research process is not only discovering new knowledge but also to confront assumptions and explore what we don't know.

Claiming limitiations is a subjective process because you must evaluate the impact of those limitations . Don't just list key weaknesses and the magnitude of a study's limitations. To do so diminishes the validity of your research because it leaves the reader wondering whether, or in what ways, limitation(s) in your study may have impacted the findings and conclusions. Limitations require a critical, overall appraisal and interpretation of their impact. You should answer the question: do these problems with errors, methods, validity, etc. eventually matter and, if so, to what extent?

Structure: How to Structure the Research Limitations Section of Your Dissertation . Dissertations and Theses: An Online Textbook. Laerd.com.

Descriptions of Possible Limitations

All studies have limitations . However, it is important that you restrict your discussion to limitations related to the research problem under investigation. For example, if a meta-analysis of existing literature is not a stated purpose of your research, it should not be discussed as a limitation. Do not apologize for not addressing issues that you did not promise to investigate in your paper.

Here are examples of limitations you may need to describe and to discuss how they possibly impacted your findings. Descriptions of limitations should be stated in the past tense.

Possible Methodological Limitations

• Sample size -- the number of the units of analysis you use in your study is dictated by the type of research problem you are investigating. Note that, if your sample size is too small, it will be difficult to find significant relationships from the data, as statistical tests normally require a larger sample size to ensure a representative distribution of the population and to be considered representative of groups of people to whom results will be generalized or transferred.
• Lack of available and/or reliable data -- a lack of data or of reliable data will likely require you to limit the scope of your analysis, the size of your sample, or it can be a significant obstacle in finding a trend and a meaningful relationship. You need to not only describe these limitations but to offer reasons why you believe data is missing or is unreliable. However, don’t just throw up your hands in frustration; use this as an opportunity to describe the need for future research.
• Lack of prior research studies on the topic -- citing prior research studies forms the basis of your literature review and helps lay a foundation for understanding the research problem you are investigating. Depending on the currency or scope of your research topic, there may be little, if any, prior research on your topic. Before assuming this to be true, consult with a librarian! In cases when a librarian has confirmed that there is a lack of prior research, you may be required to develop an entirely new research typology [for example, using an exploratory rather than an explanatory research design]. Note that this limitation can serve as an important opportunity to describe the need for further research.
• Measure used to collect the data -- sometimes it is the case that, after completing your interpretation of the findings, you discover that the way in which you gathered data inhibited your ability to conduct a thorough analysis of the results. For example, you regret not including a specific question in a survey that, in retrospect, could have helped address a particular issue that emerged later in the study. Acknowledge the deficiency by stating a need in future research to revise the specific method for gathering data.
• Self-reported data -- whether you are relying on pre-existing self-reported data or you are conducting a qualitative research study and gathering the data yourself, self-reported data is limited by the fact that it rarely can be independently verified. In other words, you have to take what people say, whether in interviews, focus groups, or on questionnaires, at face value. However, self-reported data contain several potential sources of bias that should be noted as limitations: (1) selective memory (remembering or not remembering experiences or events that occurred at some point in the past); (2) telescoping [recalling events that occurred at one time as if they occurred at another time]; (3) attribution [the act of attributing positive events and outcomes to one's own agency but attributing negative events and outcomes to external forces]; and, (4) exaggeration [the act of representing outcomes or embellishing events as more significant than is actually suggested from other data].

Possible Limitations of the Researcher

• Access -- if your study depends on having access to people, organizations, or documents and, for whatever reason, access is denied or otherwise limited, the reasons for this need to be described.
• Longitudinal effects -- unlike your professor, who can literally devote years [even a lifetime] to studying a single research problem, the time available to investigate a research problem and to measure change or stability within a sample is constrained by the due date of your assignment. Be sure to choose a topic that does not require an excessive amount of time to complete the literature review, apply the methodology, and gather and interpret the results. If you're unsure, talk to your professor.
• Cultural and other type of bias -- we all have biases, whether we are conscience of them or not. Bias is when a person, place, or thing is viewed or shown in a consistently inaccurate way. It is usually negative, though one can have a positive bias as well. When proof-reading your paper, be especially critical in reviewing how you have stated a problem, selected the data to be studied, what may have been omitted, the manner in which you have ordered events, people, or places and how you have chosen to represent a person, place, or thing, to name a phenomenon, or to use possible words with a positive or negative connotation. Note that if you detect bias in prior research, it must be acknowledged and you should explain what measures were taken to avoid perpetuating bias.
• Fluency in a language -- if your research focuses on measuring the perceived value of after-school tutoring among Mexican-American ESL [English as a Second Language] students, for example, and you are not fluent in Spanish, you are limited in being able to read and interpret Spanish language research studies on the topic. This deficiency should be acknowledged.

Brutus, Stéphane et al. Self-Reported Limitations and Future Directions in Scholarly Reports: Analysis and Recommendations. Journal of Management 39 (January 2013): 48-75; Senunyeme, Emmanuel K. Business Research Methods . Powerpoint Presentation. Regent University of Science and Technology.

Structure and Writing Style

Information about the limitations of your study are generally placed either at the beginning of the discussion section of your paper so the reader knows and understands the limitations before reading the rest of your analysis of the findings, or, the limitations are outlined at the conclusion of the discussion section as an acknowledgement of the need for further study. Statements about a study's limitations should not be buried in the body [middle] of the discussion section unless a limitation is specific to something covered in that part of the paper. If this is the case, though, the limitation should be reiterated at the conclusion of the section.

If you determine that your study is seriously flawed due to important limitations , such as, an inability to acquire critical data, consider reframing it as a pilot study intended to lay the groundwork for a more complete research study in the future. Be sure, though, to specifically explain the ways that these flaws can be successfully overcome in later studies.

But, do not use this as an excuse for not developing a thorough research paper! Review the tab in this guide for developing a research topic . If serious limitations exist, it generally indicates a likelihood that your research problem is too narrowly defined or that the issue or event under study  is too recent and, thus, very little research has been written about it. If serious limitations do emerge, consult with your professor about possible ways to overcome them or how to reframe your study.

When discussing the limitations of your research, be sure to:

• Describe each limitation in detailed but concise terms;
• Explain why each limitation exists;
• Provide the reasons why each limitation could not be overcome using the method(s) chosen to gather the data [cite to other studies that had similar problems when possible];
• Assess the impact of each limitation in relation to  the overall findings and conclusions of your study; and,
• If appropriate, describe how these limitations could point to the need for further research.

Remember that the method you chose may be the source of a significant limitation that has emerged during your interpretation of the results [for example, you didn't ask a particular question in a survey that you later wish you had]. If this is the case, don't panic. Acknowledge it, and explain how applying a different or more robust methodology might address the research problem more effectively in any future study. A underlying goal of scholarly research is not only to prove what works, but to demonstrate what doesn't work or what needs further clarification.

Brutus, Stéphane et al. Self-Reported Limitations and Future Directions in Scholarly Reports: Analysis and Recommendations. Journal of Management 39 (January 2013): 48-75; Ioannidis, John P.A. Limitations are not Properly Acknowledged in the Scientific Literature. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 60 (2007): 324-329; Pasek, Josh. Writing the Empirical Social Science Research Paper: A Guide for the Perplexed . January 24, 2012. Academia.edu; Structure: How to Structure the Research Limitations Section of Your Dissertation . Dissertations and Theses: An Online Textbook. Laerd.com; What Is an Academic Paper? Institute for Writing Rhetoric. Dartmouth College; Writing the Experimental Report: Methods, Results, and Discussion. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University.

Writing Tip

Don't Inflate the Importance of Your Findings! After all the hard work and long hours devoted to writing your research paper, it is easy to get carried away with attributing unwarranted importance to what you’ve done. We all want our academic work to be viewed as excellent and worthy of a good grade, but it is important that you understand and openly acknowledge the limitiations of your study. Inflating of the importance of your study's findings in an attempt hide its flaws is a big turn off to your readers. A measure of humility goes a long way!

Another Writing Tip

Negative Results are Not a Limitation!

Negative evidence refers to findings that unexpectedly challenge rather than support your hypothesis. If you didn't get the results you anticipated, it may mean your hypothesis was incorrect and needs to be reformulated, or, perhaps you have stumbled onto something unexpected that warrants further study. Moreover, the absence of an effect may be very telling in many situations, particularly in experimental research designs. In any case, your results may be of importance to others even though they did not support your hypothesis. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that results contrary to what you expected is a limitation to your study. If you carried out the research well, they are simply your results and only require additional interpretation.

Yet Another Writing Tip

A Note about Sample Size Limitations in Qualitative Research

Sample sizes are typically smaller in qualitative research because, as the study goes on, acquiring more data does not necessarily lead to more information. This is because one occurrence of a piece of data, or a code, is all that is necessary to ensure that it becomes part of the analysis framework. However, it remains true that sample sizes that are too small cannot adequately support claims of having achieved valid conclusions and sample sizes that are too large do not permit the deep, naturalistic, and inductive analysis that defines qualitative inquiry. Determining adequate sample size in qualitative research is ultimately a matter of judgment and experience in evaluating the quality of the information collected against the uses to which it will be applied and the particular research method and purposeful sampling strategy employed. If the sample size is found to be a limitation, it may reflect your judgement about the methodological technique chosen [e.g., single life history study versus focus group interviews] rather than the number of respondents used.

Huberman, A. Michael and Matthew B. Miles. Data Management and Analysis Methods. In Handbook of Qualitative Research. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), pp. 428-444.

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What are the limitations in research and how to write them?

Learn about the potential limitations in research and how to appropriately address them in order to deliver honest and ethical research.

It is fairly uncommon for researchers to stumble into the term research limitations when working on their research paper. Limitations in research can arise owing to constraints on design, methods, materials, and so on, and these aspects, unfortunately, may have an influence on your subject’s findings.

In this Mind The Graph’s article, we’ll discuss some recommendations for writing limitations in research , provide examples of various common types of limitations, and suggest how to properly present this information.

What are the limitations in research?

The limitations in research are the constraints in design, methods or even researchers’ limitations that affect and influence the interpretation of your research’s ultimate findings. These are limitations on the generalization and usability of findings that emerge from the design of the research and/or the method employed to ensure validity both internally and externally. 

Researchers are usually cautious to acknowledge the limitations of their research in their publications for fear of undermining the research’s scientific validity. No research is faultless or covers every possible angle. As a result, addressing the constraints of your research exhibits honesty and integrity .

Why should include limitations of research in my paper?

Though limitations tackle potential flaws in research, commenting on them at the conclusion of your paper, by demonstrating that you are aware of these limitations and explaining how they impact the conclusions that may be taken from the research, improves your research by disclosing any issues before other researchers or reviewers do . 

Additionally, emphasizing research constraints implies that you have thoroughly investigated the ramifications of research shortcomings and have a thorough understanding of your research problem. 

Limits exist in any research; being honest about them and explaining them would impress researchers and reviewers more than disregarding them. 

Remember that acknowledging a research’s shortcomings offers a chance to provide ideas for future research, but be careful to describe how your study may help to concentrate on these outstanding problems.

Possible limitations examples

Here are some limitations connected to methodology and the research procedure that you may need to explain and discuss in connection to your findings.

Methodological limitations

Sample size.

The number of units of analysis used in your study is determined by the sort of research issue being investigated. It is important to note that if your sample is too small, finding significant connections in the data will be challenging, as statistical tests typically require a larger sample size to ensure a fair representation and this can be limiting. 

Lack of available or reliable data

A lack of data or trustworthy data will almost certainly necessitate limiting the scope of your research or the size of your sample, or it can be a substantial impediment to identifying a pattern and a relevant connection.

Lack of prior research on the subject

Citing previous research papers forms the basis of your literature review and aids in comprehending the research subject you are researching. Yet there may be little if any, past research on your issue.

The measure used to collect data

After finishing your analysis of the findings, you realize that the method you used to collect data limited your capacity to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of the findings. Recognize the flaw by mentioning that future researchers should change the specific approach for data collection.

Issues with research samples and selection

Sampling inaccuracies arise when a probability sampling method is employed to choose a sample, but that sample does not accurately represent the overall population or the relevant group. As a result, your study suffers from “sampling bias” or “selection bias.”

Limitations of the research

When your research requires polling certain persons or a specific group, you may have encountered the issue of limited access to these interviewees. Because of the limited access, you may need to reorganize or rearrange your research. In this scenario, explain why access is restricted and ensure that your findings are still trustworthy and valid despite the constraint.

Time constraints

Practical difficulties may limit the amount of time available to explore a research issue and monitor changes as they occur. If time restrictions have any detrimental influence on your research, recognize this impact by expressing the necessity for a future investigation.

Due to their cultural origins or opinions on observed events, researchers may carry biased opinions, which can influence the credibility of a research. Furthermore, researchers may exhibit biases toward data and conclusions that only support their hypotheses or arguments.

The structure of the limitations section 

The limitations of your research are usually stated at the beginning of the discussion section of your paper so that the reader is aware of and comprehends the limitations prior to actually reading the rest of your findings, or they are stated at the end of the discussion section as an acknowledgment of the need for further research.

The ideal way is to divide your limitations section into three steps: 

1. Identify the research constraints; 

2. Describe in great detail how they affect your research; 

3. Mention the opportunity for future investigations and give possibilities. 

By following this method while addressing the constraints of your research, you will be able to effectively highlight your research’s shortcomings without jeopardizing the quality and integrity of your research.

Present your research or paper in an innovative way

If you want your readers to be engaged and participate in your research, try Mind The Graph tool to add visual assets to your content. Infographics may improve comprehension and are easy to read, just as the Mind The Graph tool is simple to use and offers a variety of templates from which you can select the one that best suits your information.

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Home » Delimitations in Research – Types, Examples and Writing Guide

Delimitations in Research – Types, Examples and Writing Guide

Table of Contents

Delimitations

Definition:

Delimitations refer to the specific boundaries or limitations that are set in a research study in order to narrow its scope and focus. Delimitations may be related to a variety of factors, including the population being studied, the geographical location, the time period, the research design , and the methods or tools being used to collect data .

The Importance of Delimitations in Research Studies

Here are some reasons why delimitations are important in research studies:

• Provide focus : Delimitations help researchers focus on a specific area of interest and avoid getting sidetracked by tangential topics. By setting clear boundaries, researchers can concentrate their efforts on the most relevant and significant aspects of the research question.
• Increase validity : Delimitations ensure that the research is more valid by defining the boundaries of the study. When researchers establish clear criteria for inclusion and exclusion, they can better control for extraneous variables that might otherwise confound the results.
• Improve generalizability : Delimitations help researchers determine the extent to which their findings can be generalized to other populations or contexts. By specifying the sample size, geographic region, time frame, or other relevant factors, researchers can provide more accurate estimates of the generalizability of their results.
• Enhance feasibility : Delimitations help researchers identify the resources and time required to complete the study. By setting realistic parameters, researchers can ensure that the study is feasible and can be completed within the available time and resources.
• Clarify scope: Delimitations help readers understand the scope of the research project. By explicitly stating what is included and excluded, researchers can avoid confusion and ensure that readers understand the boundaries of the study.

Types of Delimitations in Research

Here are some types of delimitations in research and their significance:

Time Delimitations

This type of delimitation refers to the time frame in which the research will be conducted. Time delimitations are important because they help to narrow down the scope of the study and ensure that the research is feasible within the given time constraints.

Geographical Delimitations

Geographical delimitations refer to the geographic boundaries within which the research will be conducted. These delimitations are significant because they help to ensure that the research is relevant to the intended population or location.

Population Delimitations

Population delimitations refer to the specific group of people that the research will focus on. These delimitations are important because they help to ensure that the research is targeted to a specific group, which can improve the accuracy of the results.

Data Delimitations

Data delimitations refer to the specific types of data that will be used in the research. These delimitations are important because they help to ensure that the data is relevant to the research question and that the research is conducted using reliable and valid data sources.

Scope Delimitations

Scope delimitations refer to the specific aspects or dimensions of the research that will be examined. These delimitations are important because they help to ensure that the research is focused and that the findings are relevant to the research question.

How to Write Delimitations

In order to write delimitations in research, you can follow these steps:

• Identify the scope of your study : Determine the extent of your research by defining its boundaries. This will help you to identify the areas that are within the scope of your research and those that are outside of it.
• Determine the time frame : Decide on the time period that your research will cover. This could be a specific period, such as a year, or it could be a general time frame, such as the last decade.
• I dentify the population : Determine the group of people or objects that your study will focus on. This could be a specific age group, gender, profession, or geographic location.
• Establish the sample size : Determine the number of participants that your study will involve. This will help you to establish the number of people you need to recruit for your study.
• Determine the variables: Identify the variables that will be measured in your study. This could include demographic information, attitudes, behaviors, or other factors.
• Explain the limitations : Clearly state the limitations of your study. This could include limitations related to time, resources, sample size, or other factors that may impact the validity of your research.
• Justify the limitations : Explain why these limitations are necessary for your research. This will help readers understand why certain factors were excluded from the study.

When to Write Delimitations in Research

Here are some situations when you may need to write delimitations in research:

• When defining the scope of the study: Delimitations help to define the boundaries of your research by specifying what is and what is not included in your study. For instance, you may delimit your study by focusing on a specific population, geographic region, time period, or research methodology.
• When addressing limitations: Delimitations can also be used to address the limitations of your research. For example, if your data is limited to a certain timeframe or geographic area, you can include this information in your delimitations to help readers understand the limitations of your findings.
• When justifying the relevance of the study : Delimitations can also help you to justify the relevance of your research. For instance, if you are conducting a study on a specific population or region, you can explain why this group or area is important and how your research will contribute to the understanding of this topic.
• When clarifying the research question or hypothesis : Delimitations can also be used to clarify your research question or hypothesis. By specifying the boundaries of your study, you can ensure that your research question or hypothesis is focused and specific.
• When establishing the context of the study : Finally, delimitations can help you to establish the context of your research. By providing information about the scope and limitations of your study, you can help readers to understand the context in which your research was conducted and the implications of your findings.

Examples of Delimitations in Research

Examples of Delimitations in Research are as follows:

Research Title : “Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Cybersecurity Threat Detection”

Delimitations :

• The study will focus solely on the use of artificial intelligence in detecting and mitigating cybersecurity threats.
• The study will only consider the impact of AI on threat detection and not on other aspects of cybersecurity such as prevention, response, or recovery.
• The research will be limited to a specific type of cybersecurity threats, such as malware or phishing attacks, rather than all types of cyber threats.
• The study will only consider the use of AI in a specific industry, such as finance or healthcare, rather than examining its impact across all industries.
• The research will only consider AI-based threat detection tools that are currently available and widely used, rather than including experimental or theoretical AI models.

Research Title: “The Effects of Social Media on Academic Performance: A Case Study of College Students”

Delimitations:

• The study will focus only on college students enrolled in a particular university.
• The study will only consider social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
• The study will only analyze the academic performance of students based on their GPA and course grades.
• The study will not consider the impact of other factors such as student demographics, socioeconomic status, or other factors that may affect academic performance.
• The study will only use self-reported data from students, rather than objective measures of their social media usage or academic performance.

Purpose of Delimitations

Some Purposes of Delimitations are as follows:

• Focusing the research : By defining the scope of the study, delimitations help researchers to narrow down their research questions and focus on specific aspects of the topic. This allows for a more targeted and meaningful study.
• Clarifying the research scope : Delimitations help to clarify the boundaries of the research, which helps readers to understand what is and is not included in the study.
• Avoiding scope creep : Delimitations help researchers to stay focused on their research objectives and avoid being sidetracked by tangential issues or data.
• Enhancing the validity of the study : By setting clear boundaries, delimitations help to ensure that the study is valid and reliable.
• Improving the feasibility of the study : Delimitations help researchers to ensure that their study is feasible and can be conducted within the time and resources available.

Applications of Delimitations

Here are some common applications of delimitations:

• Geographic delimitations : Researchers may limit their study to a specific geographic area, such as a particular city, state, or country. This helps to narrow the focus of the study and makes it more manageable.
• Time delimitations : Researchers may limit their study to a specific time period, such as a decade, a year, or a specific date range. This can be useful for studying trends over time or for comparing data from different time periods.
• Population delimitations : Researchers may limit their study to a specific population, such as a particular age group, gender, or ethnic group. This can help to ensure that the study is relevant to the population being studied.
• Data delimitations : Researchers may limit their study to specific types of data, such as survey responses, interviews, or archival records. This can help to ensure that the study is based on reliable and relevant data.
• Conceptual delimitations : Researchers may limit their study to specific concepts or variables, such as only studying the effects of a particular treatment on a specific outcome. This can help to ensure that the study is focused and clear.

Advantages of Delimitations

Some Advantages of Delimitations are as follows:

• Helps to focus the study: Delimitations help to narrow down the scope of the research and identify specific areas that need to be investigated. This helps to focus the study and ensures that the research is not too broad or too narrow.
• Defines the study population: Delimitations can help to define the population that will be studied. This can include age range, gender, geographical location, or any other factors that are relevant to the research. This helps to ensure that the study is more specific and targeted.
• Provides clarity: Delimitations help to provide clarity about the research study. By identifying the boundaries and limitations of the research, it helps to avoid confusion and ensures that the research is more understandable.
• Improves validity: Delimitations can help to improve the validity of the research by ensuring that the study is more focused and specific. This can help to ensure that the research is more accurate and reliable.
• Reduces bias: Delimitations can help to reduce bias by limiting the scope of the research. This can help to ensure that the research is more objective and unbiased.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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How to write the ‘limitations or shortcomings of the study’ in a research paper?

‘Limitations or shortcomings of the study’ is the last stage of a thesis. After the study is completed, as a researcher, you may have identified shortcomings. Enlisting those areas in the thesis serves many purposes.

Identifying limitations or shortcomings in a study means that you have carefully considered their potential impact on your findings. So, when readers frame an opinion about your study, they know the conditions under which your findings are valid. Secondly, it establishes the credibility of your research. No study is complete without its set of limitations. Therefore identifying these limitations formally acknowledges that your research was carried out ethically. Finally, it establishes the validity of the research.

Researcher versus methodology

Researcher’s limitation occurs due to the researcher’s shortcomings. This may include sampling errors such as using a cluster random sampling instead of simple random sampling. Another type of it is the inability of the researcher to cover a wide range of respondents from a large geographical location. Another researcher based shortcoming is while conducting research that has poor literature support. The research may lack direction of the study, which leads to poor methodology implementation. On the other hand methodology, related limitations include poor methods of data collection.

For example, including fewer questions or irrelevant questions in the survey or interview questionnaire to collect data. In addition, methodological limitations also involve using wrong or irrelevant data analysis methods to present the findings or address the aim of the study. In this case, the limitation is an inadequate questionnaire for data collection to address the aim of the study.

Impact and data related shortcomings

Impact related shortcomings are those where the research suffers from poor impact by the causal factors that do not show a variation of the findings. This mainly occurs when you use manipulated data or have poorly planned the methodology. As a result, the findings may seem to be a too obvious or small positive or negative change in a variable quantity or function. On the other hand, data limitations are almost the same as methodological limitations mentioned in the previous type. Poor data collection methods and lack of large sample size for survey make for poor data.

Pre-research and post-research shortcomings

Pre-research shortcomings are the ones that you are aware of or expect during the conduction of the study. Usually, pre-research shortcomings are presented in the proposal or synopsis of the main research. However, there are no solutions to these problems. On the other hand, post-research limitations are the ones that are identified after the study was conducted. For instance, biased findings or contradictory findings comes under post-research limitations. This may also occur while conducting triangulation, and the findings of quantitative and qualitative do not match the secondary literature findings.

Steps to follow

There are many ways to write this section, but the three-step formula is popular.

Step 1: Announcement

In this step clearly mention the shortcomings that were faced in the study. List out all the shortcomings faced starting from methods to the statistical findings, such as bias in sampling, lack of respondent participation, etc. This section of the limitation should be only 10% of the total content.

Step 2: Reflection

In this step, justify and elaborate on the limitations. Justify why the limitations occurred. This should have the maximum content, of about 60%.

For instance, the biases of the responses may have occurred from poor knowledge of the participants or the participants were not aware of the importance of the study. Another possibility of biases of the responses is that they did not want to display the negative aspects and responded positively for the sake of the study. In addition, research limitation may also be possible as the study chose only one case for the collection of data.

Step 3: Look forward

This mainly comprises of the future scope of the study. Suggest what should be done in the future by researchers looking to conduct similar studies. This section should comprise the remaining 30% of the total content.

For instance, since, the study found the limitation of response biases; it is suggested that future researchers must choose more than one organization for distribution and collection of the survey or interview. In addition, a pilot study can be conducted well before the collection of final data.

What not to write?

• Do not apologize for writing the limitations of the study or never apologize for the occurrence of the limitations. Without it, the research is never complete, and the study will never move in the right direction.
• Avoid referring to personal limitations such as poor data collection due to lack of time. Do not mention points that will show negative impression your due diligence in the research. Avoid statements that will lead to the lack of your credibility. This may include statements such as ‘since the study was on secondary data gathered, many missing variables were discovered. Since the variables are important and cannot be ignored; there was a manipulation of the missing data’.
• Never mention shortcomings that have already been mentioned in the previous studies. Research is initiated by identifying the limitations of past research published in the same field. Do not use sentences like, ‘we found similar limitations as were mentioned by ABD, (2018) in the study ‘how to write limitations’? Or ‘the current study tried to avoid the limitations as mentioned in ABD, (2018), but the same still occurred.’
• Do not over-write or paraphrase just for the sake of filling up words. Never repeat the same points over and over again. For instance, once spoken of the sample size limitations, do not write that, ‘the study also saw the limitation of less number of people turning up for the survey questionnaire fill-ins.’

Sample of ‘limitations of the study’

The following is a classic example of how to write the limitations in a thesis.

The main aim of the study was to assess the factors that lead to poor limitations writing in a research paper by research scholars. Although the study conducted a thorough survey, there were certain limitations while exploring the aim of the study. It is expected that these points will help future researchers to avoid facing the same shortcomings.

• While conducting the pilot study it was expected that the number of participants will be a minimum of 200. However, after the final data collection and compilation of data, there were only 129 participants for the study. This might be from the fact that the participants were not interested in participating or did not have the time to completely fill in the questionnaire. Since the sample populations were mainly research scholars from a tertiary institute, maybe they did not have enough time to fill in the questionnaires. Therefore, in future studies that use research scholars as a sample population but consider providing questionnaires or collect data from a much larger group or choose more than one institutions for the collection of data.
• It was found from the study that, the current findings contradict the findings of previous studies on factors that lead to poor limitations writing in a research paper by research scholars. This may be from the fact that the studies conducted previously were based on European countries and America. Therefore, the perspective of the research scholars may have varied. Again, the methods of research differ from one place to another and the challenges faced by researchers also differ. This may have led to the limitation of contradictory findings. Therefore, it is suggested that the researchers must consider the factors found from different regions and assess them or make a comparative study to find the factors and how they differ.

Concluding note

Limitations of the study is a very important part of the research. It helps future studies and researches to focus on more innovative ways to conduct research and ignore the issues faced. Be honest, pragmatic and structured while writing this section. Go through ample examples from different authors before writing your own. I suggest you using pointers to specifically write or inform the limitations as indicated in the limitation example. Be specific about the limitations and try not to make up to the limitations.

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Limitations Of the Study Example and Tips For Students

We are all subject to imperfections. This means that while we may excel at something, it’ll always have some flaws. On that note, every study, no matter how proficient the writer may be, has study limitations. Therefore, while you want your academic work to be viewed as exemplary and worthy of premium grades, it’s also essential that you accept it’ll always be subject to the limitations of a study. The sooner you do, the better your work will be, and the better your professor will view you. To put it simply, a little humility goes a long way not only in life but also in research. Described herein is all you need to know about limitations to a study.

What are Limitations in a Study?

Why should you include limitations of a study in your paper, examples of limitations of study in research proposal.

Study limitations refer to those characteristics or constraints that hinder or influence the interpretation of the writer’s findings from research. To put it simply, a limitation is any shortcoming that impacts a study and its outcomes. They are a normal part of any study, observational, or cross-sectional study. In most cases, they are often a result of flawed methodology, insufficient academic resources, or a lack of previous research studies on the topic. These limitations are usually part of the discussion section of the survey, just before the conclusion.

Before we even head over to the examples of study limitations in various papers, take time to see why it’s essential you first understand why you should acknowledge your study limitations below

• They Acknowledge Your Study’s Flaws before Anyone Does. As noted, every study is subject to limitations of the study. Therefore, regardless of how experienced a writer you may be, your work will always have flaws. So it’s wiser to openly acknowledge them rather than wait for your professor to point them out, and give you a lower grade because you appear ignorant.
• They are Proof You’ve Done Enough Research. Limitations of a research study also prove to the reader that you did serious research on the subject. They also show you took time to think critically of the subject questions, understood what was needed, and correctly assessed the various methods available for solving the problem. As a result, they have a reason to believe you did your best with the available findings, hence resulting in greater grades even on a subject with limited research.
• Study Limitations Create Room for Further Research. Study limitations also create room for you to propose further research on a particular topic in the future. This, in turn, keeps the reader tuned for any developments that may come up in the future.

Now that you know study limitations are normal and help make your grade stronger, what are the various limitations of a research study that you should mention? Here are a few to study limitation examples to get you started.

• Language Barrier: Some studies will require you to use a different language other than your native one. In such instances, you might need to use a translator or translation app. Even so, you might not get accurate information or some data might get lost during the translation.  An example of this is when you study the effectiveness of a certain model of study on students who are learning English. In such a case, you might deal with language-related issues. If so, make sure you have highlighted it in your discussion. Explain how the language barrier affected the finding.
• Culture Bias: Another factor that can impact your research is cultural bias. Unfortunately, most people are not conscious when it comes to cultural bias. Though you might get positive cultural bias, in most cases, this is a negative issue. So, you should be alert when proofreading your work so that you can take notes of bias. It could be in the samples you offer or any other detail in your research. If the sources you are using for your report have any form of bias, acknowledge it and explain the effort you used to avoid it.
• Timing Study: At times, your resort might need you to investigate a certain phenomenon long after it took place. In such situations, you might be late in your data collection. If so, you might not have the right respondents, and that will affect your study’s outcome. Thus, the timing of your study might represent a strong limitation. Highlight this fact when presenting your research and discuss ways that your study’s poor timing might have influenced the outcome.
• Financial Resource: Some studies might need you to buy certain tools to help. In some incidents, you might have to hire people to assist you with the data collection process. Some studies will need you to buy specific statistical software or reward those who participate in products and giveaways. If you do not have enough financial resources, you will not carry out your research as required. Since such limitations will impact the results of your study, include them in your report. Discuss how lack of financial resources has impacted your outcome.
• Limited Access to Data: Limited access to data is one of the most common limitations of research studies, and one you will face more regularly. For instance, if your subject topic involves researching specific government organizations, then you may lack access to vital information. Also, you may have no respondents. This often limits the scope of your analysis, leaving you no option but to restructure your study based on the findings. In such a case, you must state this as the limitation of the study. But don’t just list it as “limited data access.” Make sure you explain the reasons for limited data access, so the reader doesn’t question the validity of your research.
• Sample Size: This is one of the most common limitations of a cross-sectional study. It often comes about because the nature of the problem dictates the sample size. For instance, if your study seeks to explain the perception of teenage consumers towards a particular product, but you only conduct your study with 50 respondents, your results will be inaccurate. This is because the number of teenagers in a country like the US is incredibly high; hence, the opinion of only 50 respondents doesn’t adequately represent the opinion of the rest. Therefore, if this is your limitation, be sure to state your study is based on a smaller sample size and that you could have generated many accurate results on a larger one.
• Lack of Previous Research on the Subject:  In other cases, you might have unlimited access to data, but if there is no research done on the subject matter, then this will also impact the interpretation of your findings. For instance, if the research subject is whether a cryptocurrency will replace fiat currencies as a future currency, then you may not find enough studies on the subject. But if you chose to explore the impact of crypto on the finance industry, then you’ll find tons of information. On that note, if you’re researching a particular subject and find that there it lacks prior research studies, ensure you acknowledge this study limitation and propose further research.
• Data Collection Methodology:  Very often, the method used to collect data usually affects the results of the study. For instance, your professor might have assigned you the topic ” is the impact of mobile phones on teenagers negative or positive?” Now, there are various to find out. If you choose only to interview teenagers for answers, there is a high chance of your results being flawed as they will only provide the positives. The data collection method is common among limitations of case-control and observational studies. Contact professional writers to learn more about it.
• Equipment: The type of equipment used to carry out a study can also hinder the findings. This is usually a regular limitation of observational studies. For example, if you’re surveying the effectiveness of smartphones, it’s important to note there is a vast array in the market. Therefore, you may use a high-quality one means your results will be positive, but low-quality ones mean your findings will render smartphones ineffective. That said, you have to consider such a limitation during your research, and if it’s unavoidable, ensure you not only list it but also explain it in your discussion.

As you’ve seen, the limitations of a research study are normal and are quite many. The above are just a few examples. So next time you’re doing research and lack access to data, make sure you include this fact in your work. Honest is a virtue, and admitting as well as explaining why your findings may be flawed will impress your readers.

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How to Write About the Limitations of a Scientific Study

Home » Writing the Manuscript » How to Write About the Limitations of a Scientific Study

You’ve analyzed your results and reached some conclusions. Now, you’re ready to tell the world about what you’ve found and convince editors, peer reviewers, and readers that it’s important. So how do you tackle the task of also telling them about the limitations of your work?

How to write about the limitations of a study

No study is perfect, no matter how elegant its design may be, and many journals require authors to write a section at the end of the discussion about the limitations of their study. For some studies, these limitations will be obvious: small sample size, multiple comparisons without corrections, observational design and risk for confounding. For other designs, the limitations may be less obvious, but you’ll still need to list them.

Six tips for writing your limitations section

• Focus on weaknesses in your design and analyses, rather than results.
• Start with a bold statement: “This study has some limitations.” Don’t try to soften it with less obvious language.
• Enumerate the limitations, if you can. If you have three limitations to discuss, say so: “This study has three main limitations.”
• Be direct about what they are. “The first limitation is the small number of participants.”
• Explain if needed, but without being defensive. “Because this condition is so rare, we anticipated that recruitment might not meet targets. However, also because the condition is rare, the findings of this study offer new, potentially useful information for this patient population.”
• Signal that you are wrapping up your limitations: “Finally, we could not control for every possible lifestyle factor, and the observational nature of this design leaves the possibility of residual confounding.”

What not to include in the limitations section

You do not need to include every single thing that you personally view as a limitation of the work. For example, if you were late in making a measurement one day, but that timing did not affect outcomes, you probably don’t need to mention it.

Do not be extremely defensive. Don’t expend a lot of language explaining why your work had the limitation. See above for an example of how to explain a limitation while still emphasizing the importance of your work.

Usually, avoid pointing fingers in an accusatory way at other studies. If your work has a specific limitation because of real-world considerations, you can point that out, rather than saying as justification that some other author group or groups did the same thing.

In a similar vein, the limitations section is not usually the place to compare a limitation of your study favorably to the limitations of other studies. For example, you should not say, “We had only 25 participants, but Smith et al. had only 12 and they still published their results.” That comes across as defensive and uncollegial.

Where do you comment on the strengths?

The usual practice is to place the strengths of a study ahead of the limitations. Most authors will list the strengths, beginning with a phrase such as, “Our study had several strengths,” and then briefly describing what those are. As with limitations, these strengths usually will relate to design: large population, excellent controls, multiple adjustments, or double-blind design. If your design is considered more stringent than what others have used before (e.g., a randomized trial as opposed to an observational study), that’s a particular strength. When you’ve listed your strengths, then you move to your limitations, using phrasing such as, “Our study also had some limitations.”

Acknowledging a study’s limitations is an important part of the process of science and of communicating your results. It shows that you are willing to mention and discuss the weaknesses as well as the strengths of your work and suggests an intellectually honest presentation of your findings.

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Your Guide to Writing Limitations of a Study Section

Are you working on your thesis, dissertation, or research paper? One of the sections that you must include, and do it properly is the limitations. So, what is study limitations and how do you go about it?

Table of Contents

• 1. What are the limitations of a research study?
• 2. Importance of including limitations in research
• 3. Examples of limitations of a study
• 3.1. Methodological Related Limitations
• 3.2. Limitations of the Researcher
• 4. How to write limitations of a study
• 5. Tips for writing research limitations

What Are The Limitations of a Research Study?

What are the limitations in a study? Limitations of a study are the hurdles, call them characteristics of your study design, which impact the interpretation of the findings.

They challenge generalizability and use of the findings as you had anticipated when selecting the research design. Understanding these limitations helps you to explain to the reader how they impacted the results and the conclusion, in line with your study design.

Importance of Including Limitations in Research

While some researchers feel that highlighting the limitations in research undermine the value of their studies in the eyes of the reader, the reverse is indeed true. Here are some key reasons why you need to include them:

• Helps you to answer the questions that your professor might ask

When professors mark students’ papers, one of the areas they check keenly is the limitations of the study. So, instead of waiting for your teacher to ask about research limitations, risking lower grades because you ignored the section, you should make sure to include them.

• Limitations of research studies offer you the chance to point at areas that need further studies

If the limitations you encountered during your study impacted the findings of the research, you could demonstrate how further studies might be crucial in giving answers to unanswered questions.

• Clearly presented limitations show that you understand the research problem well

When you finally present your research findings, the assessment committee expects to see professionally done work. Therefore, carefully presenting the limitations of research implies that you thought about the study problem, did ample review of the related literature, and analyzed the selected methods.

When presenting the study limitations, it is important to appreciate that you need to go beyond listing them. Target answering the question: “Do the study limitations impact on the findings and their validity?” and “If they do, to what extent?” So, go ahead and explain them to the readers so that they do not point at gaps in your finished study.

Examples Of Limitations Of A Study

When carrying out your study, there are many challenges, but it is crucial to restrict the focus to the limitations that are closely related to the research problem. When writing about limitations in a study, make sure to use the past tense. Here are common limitations when doing research:

Methodological Related Limitations

Sample Size

The number of units that you will use for study is determined by the type of research problem that you are addressing. If the sample is too small, you are likely to find it challenging to establish the relationships between the different variables. Note that if you are doing a qualitative study, the sample size will be less relevant, especially if it was explained well in the research problem.

Lack of available or reliable data

If you do not have enough data or it is unreliable, there is a danger of your study’s scope being limited or failing to find meaningful relationship in your study. So, make sure to carefully describe these imitations, explaining why you think the data is unreliable or missing. This is also a perfect opportunity to call for further studies in order to fill the gap.

Lack of prior research on the topic

When doing research, you are required to carry a comprehensive review of the available literature to lay a strong foundation for better understanding of the problem being investigated. Depending on the nature and the scope of the topic, it is not uncommon to find areas that are poorly studied. To avoid the problem, you should start by carefully assessing the availability of related studies. For example, you should check with different libraries to establish the availability of prior studies.

Measuring the collected data

After interpreting the findings of the study, you might establish that the manner in which you gathered the data limited the ability to do a thorough analysis. For example, you might regret failing to add specific questions that could have helped address an issue that arose later in your research. So, acknowledge this challenge and point at the need for further studies to review the method of data collection.

Limitations of the Researcher

One of the common limitations in research is poor access to things such as documents, organizations or people. In such a situation, you should clearly state the reasons for getting denied access to the targeted source of information.

Longitudinal Impacts

Unlike your teacher who can commit years to study a selected problem, the timeframe for completing your assignment is likely to be limited. So, be sure to select a topic that does not need a lot of time to complete.

Cultural related bias

Cultural bias is one of the common examples of limitations in research that can have significant implications on a study’s findings. Well, whether people are conscious or not, they always have some biases. In most cases, this is negative, though it is also possible to get positive biases. Be extra careful when proofreading your work to note cases of bias in the selected data, sample or other details. If the resources you are using have instances of bias, ensure to acknowledge and explain your effort to void it.

Language barrier

If your study involves dealing with people using different languages, communication can be a major barrier. For example, if you are studying the effectiveness of a certain study model on students learning English as a second language, you are likely to experience language related challenges. So, make sure to acknowledge them.

How to Write Limitations Of a Study

When working on your research, information about the limitations is placed at the start of the discussion chapter/section of the paper. This implies that your reader will understand the limitations before getting deeper into the analysis. In other cases, limitations are brought out when concluding the discussion of your research, highlighting the need for further study.

Note: You should not hide the discussion in the middle of the report’s discussion. If you must, it is important to restate the limitations when concluding the discussion section.

If you establish that the study limitations have severely flawed your research, such as being unable to acquire essential data, it is advisable to consider your work as an exploratory study to serve as groundwork for later studies. In such a situation, try to be as specific as possible, explaining in what ways the flaws can be addressed.

When preparing a research paper, the limitations should not be an excuse for failing to do your work thoroughly. Remember that if the limitations are severe, it is an indication that your research problem was too narrow or the issue under consideration is too recent.

Here are some important things you need to do when writing your research limitations.

• Be concise but ensure every limitation is well explained.
• Clearly explain why the limitations in your study exist.
• Explain why it was impossible to overcome the study limitations.
• Show the impact of the limitations in relation to the study findings and conclusion.
• Where appropriate, show how the limitations demonstrate the need for additional studies.

Tips For Writing Research Limitations

Now that we have looked at different research limitations, here are some useful tips to help you write them well and enjoy higher grades.

• Do not inflate the findings of your study.

When writing research results, overemphasizing the findings can be misconstrued to mean that you are hiding the limitations. Therefore, make sure to report the results as you find them and show how the limitations affected them. You might need to check some examples of limitations in an experiment or other types of research by experts are done.

• If the results are negative, they are not limitations.

If you get negative results, it implies that they are challenging your hypothesis as opposed to supporting it. In such a situation, you should consider reformulating your hypothesis. Another cause of negative results might be stumbling unto something that was not expected.

• Go for the right sample size, especially in qualitative study

If you are carrying qualitative research, a smaller sample size might be ample because gathering more data does not necessarily result in more information. To determine the right sample size in qualitative studies is mainly dependent on your judgment, including experience in the evaluation of qualitative data. So, if the sample is considered a limitation for your study, it could be an indication of your judgment on the selected methodology.

• Check other study limitations examples and how they were presented.

One of the best ways of learning how to present your limitations is checking what others have done. Particularly, you should compare limitations in research examples to see how they were presented.

When working on your paper’s research limitations, it is prudent to be as clear and precise as possible. If you find this challenging, consider seeking writing help. The assistance is offered by experts who understand what limitations of a study are, and know how to present them well in your paper.

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21 Research Limitations Examples

Research limitations refer to the potential weaknesses inherent in a study. All studies have limitations of some sort, meaning declaring limitations doesn’t necessarily need to be a bad thing, so long as your declaration of limitations is well thought-out and explained.

Rarely is a study perfect. Researchers have to make trade-offs when developing their studies, which are often based upon practical considerations such as time and monetary constraints, weighing the breadth of participants against the depth of insight, and choosing one methodology or another.

In research, studies can have limitations such as limited scope, researcher subjectivity, and lack of available research tools.

Acknowledging the limitations of your study should be seen as a strength. It demonstrates your willingness for transparency, humility, and submission to the scientific method and can bolster the integrity of the study. It can also inform future research direction.

Typically, scholars will explore the limitations of their study in either their methodology section, their conclusion section, or both.

Research Limitations Examples

Qualitative and quantitative research offer different perspectives and methods in exploring phenomena, each with its own strengths and limitations. So, I’ve split the limitations examples sections into qualitative and quantitative below.

Qualitative Research Limitations

Qualitative research seeks to understand phenomena in-depth and in context. It focuses on the ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions.

It’s often used to explore new or complex issues, and it provides rich, detailed insights into participants’ experiences, behaviors, and attitudes. However, these strengths also create certain limitations, as explained below.

1. Subjectivity

Qualitative research often requires the researcher to interpret subjective data. One researcher may examine a text and identify different themes or concepts as more dominant than others.

Close qualitative readings of texts are necessarily subjective – and while this may be a limitation, qualitative researchers argue this is the best way to deeply understand everything in context.

Suggested Solution and Response: To minimize subjectivity bias, you could consider cross-checking your own readings of themes and data against other scholars’ readings and interpretations. This may involve giving the raw data to a supervisor or colleague and asking them to code the data separately, then coming together to compare and contrast results.

2. Researcher Bias

The concept of researcher bias is related to, but slightly different from, subjectivity.

Researcher bias refers to the perspectives and opinions you bring with you when doing your research.

For example, a researcher who is explicitly of a certain philosophical or political persuasion may bring that persuasion to bear when interpreting data.

In many scholarly traditions, we will attempt to minimize researcher bias through the utilization of clear procedures that are set out in advance or through the use of statistical analysis tools.

However, in other traditions, such as in postmodern feminist research , declaration of bias is expected, and acknowledgment of bias is seen as a positive because, in those traditions, it is believed that bias cannot be eliminated from research, so instead, it is a matter of integrity to present it upfront.

Suggested Solution and Response: Acknowledge the potential for researcher bias and, depending on your theoretical framework , accept this, or identify procedures you have taken to seek a closer approximation to objectivity in your coding and analysis.

3. Generalizability

If you’re struggling to find a limitation to discuss in your own qualitative research study, then this one is for you: all qualitative research, of all persuasions and perspectives, cannot be generalized.

This is a core feature that sets qualitative data and quantitative data apart.

The point of qualitative data is to select case studies and similarly small corpora and dig deep through in-depth analysis and thick description of data.

Often, this will also mean that you have a non-randomized sample size.

While this is a positive – you’re going to get some really deep, contextualized, interesting insights – it also means that the findings may not be generalizable to a larger population that may not be representative of the small group of people in your study.

Suggested Solution and Response: Suggest future studies that take a quantitative approach to the question.

4. The Hawthorne Effect

The Hawthorne effect refers to the phenomenon where research participants change their ‘observed behavior’ when they’re aware that they are being observed.

This effect was first identified by Elton Mayo who conducted studies of the effects of various factors ton workers’ productivity. He noticed that no matter what he did – turning up the lights, turning down the lights, etc. – there was an increase in worker outputs compared to prior to the study taking place.

Mayo realized that the mere act of observing the workers made them work harder – his observation was what was changing behavior.

So, if you’re looking for a potential limitation to name for your observational research study , highlight the possible impact of the Hawthorne effect (and how you could reduce your footprint or visibility in order to decrease its likelihood).

Suggested Solution and Response: Highlight ways you have attempted to reduce your footprint while in the field, and guarantee anonymity to your research participants.

5. Replicability

Quantitative research has a great benefit in that the studies are replicable – a researcher can get a similar sample size, duplicate the variables, and re-test a study. But you can’t do that in qualitative research.

Qualitative research relies heavily on context – a specific case study or specific variables that make a certain instance worthy of analysis. As a result, it’s often difficult to re-enter the same setting with the same variables and repeat the study.

Furthermore, the individual researcher’s interpretation is more influential in qualitative research, meaning even if a new researcher enters an environment and makes observations, their observations may be different because subjectivity comes into play much more. This doesn’t make the research bad necessarily (great insights can be made in qualitative research), but it certainly does demonstrate a weakness of qualitative research.

6. Limited Scope

“Limited scope” is perhaps one of the most common limitations listed by researchers – and while this is often a catch-all way of saying, “well, I’m not studying that in this study”, it’s also a valid point.

No study can explore everything related to a topic. At some point, we have to make decisions about what’s included in the study and what is excluded from the study.

So, you could say that a limitation of your study is that it doesn’t look at an extra variable or concept that’s certainly worthy of study but will have to be explored in your next project because this project has a clearly and narrowly defined goal.

Suggested Solution and Response: Be clear about what’s in and out of the study when writing your research question.

7. Time Constraints

This is also a catch-all claim you can make about your research project: that you would have included more people in the study, looked at more variables, and so on. But you’ve got to submit this thing by the end of next semester! You’ve got time constraints.

And time constraints are a recognized reality in all research.

But this means you’ll need to explain how time has limited your decisions. As with “limited scope”, this may mean that you had to study a smaller group of subjects, limit the amount of time you spent in the field, and so forth.

Suggested Solution and Response: Suggest future studies that will build on your current work, possibly as a PhD project.

8. Resource Intensiveness

Qualitative research can be expensive due to the cost of transcription, the involvement of trained researchers, and potential travel for interviews or observations.

So, resource intensiveness is similar to the time constraints concept. If you don’t have the funds, you have to make decisions about which tools to use, which statistical software to employ, and how many research assistants you can dedicate to the study.

Suggested Solution and Response: Suggest future studies that will gain more funding on the back of this ‘ exploratory study ‘.

9. Coding Difficulties

Data analysis in qualitative research often involves coding, which can be subjective and complex, especially when dealing with ambiguous or contradicting data.

After naming this as a limitation in your research, it’s important to explain how you’ve attempted to address this. Some ways to ‘limit the limitation’ include:

• Triangulation: Have 2 other researchers code the data as well and cross-check your results with theirs to identify outliers that may need to be re-examined, debated with the other researchers, or removed altogether.
• Procedure: Use a clear coding procedure to demonstrate reliability in your coding process. I personally use the thematic network analysis method outlined in this academic article by Attride-Stirling (2001).

Suggested Solution and Response: Triangulate your coding findings with colleagues, and follow a thematic network analysis procedure.

10. Risk of Non-Responsiveness

There is always a risk in research that research participants will be unwilling or uncomfortable sharing their genuine thoughts and feelings in the study.

This is particularly true when you’re conducting research on sensitive topics, politicized topics, or topics where the participant is expressing vulnerability .

This is similar to the Hawthorne effect (aka participant bias), where participants change their behaviors in your presence; but it goes a step further, where participants actively hide their true thoughts and feelings from you.

Suggested Solution and Response: One way to manage this is to try to include a wider group of people with the expectation that there will be non-responsiveness from some participants.

11. Risk of Attrition

Attrition refers to the process of losing research participants throughout the study.

This occurs most commonly in longitudinal studies , where a researcher must return to conduct their analysis over spaced periods of time, often over a period of years.

Things happen to people over time – they move overseas, their life experiences change, they get sick, change their minds, and even die. The more time that passes, the greater the risk of attrition.

Suggested Solution and Response: One way to manage this is to try to include a wider group of people with the expectation that there will be attrition over time.

12. Difficulty in Maintaining Confidentiality and Anonymity

Given the detailed nature of qualitative data , ensuring participant anonymity can be challenging.

If you have a sensitive topic in a specific case study, even anonymizing research participants sometimes isn’t enough. People might be able to induce who you’re talking about.

Sometimes, this will mean you have to exclude some interesting data that you collected from your final report. Confidentiality and anonymity come before your findings in research ethics – and this is a necessary limiting factor.

Suggested Solution and Response: Highlight the efforts you have taken to anonymize data, and accept that confidentiality and accountability place extremely important constraints on academic research.

13. Difficulty in Finding Research Participants

A study that looks at a very specific phenomenon or even a specific set of cases within a phenomenon means that the pool of potential research participants can be very low.

Compile on top of this the fact that many people you approach may choose not to participate, and you could end up with a very small corpus of subjects to explore. This may limit your ability to make complete findings, even in a quantitative sense.

You may need to therefore limit your research question and objectives to something more realistic.

Suggested Solution and Response: Highlight that this is going to limit the study’s generalizability significantly.

14. Ethical Limitations

Ethical limitations refer to the things you cannot do based on ethical concerns identified either by yourself or your institution’s ethics review board.

This might include threats to the physical or psychological well-being of your research subjects, the potential of releasing data that could harm a person’s reputation, and so on.

Furthermore, even if your study follows all expected standards of ethics, you still, as an ethical researcher, need to allow a research participant to pull out at any point in time, after which you cannot use their data, which demonstrates an overlap between ethical constraints and participant attrition.

Suggested Solution and Response: Highlight that these ethical limitations are inevitable but important to sustain the integrity of the research.

For more on Qualitative Research, Explore my Qualitative Research Guide

Quantitative Research Limitations

Quantitative research focuses on quantifiable data and statistical, mathematical, or computational techniques. It’s often used to test hypotheses, assess relationships and causality, and generalize findings across larger populations.

Quantitative research is widely respected for its ability to provide reliable, measurable, and generalizable data (if done well!). Its structured methodology has strengths over qualitative research, such as the fact it allows for replication of the study, which underpins the validity of the research.

However, this approach is not without it limitations, explained below.

1. Over-Simplification

Quantitative research is powerful because it allows you to measure and analyze data in a systematic and standardized way. However, one of its limitations is that it can sometimes simplify complex phenomena or situations.

In other words, it might miss the subtleties or nuances of the research subject.

For example, if you’re studying why people choose a particular diet, a quantitative study might identify factors like age, income, or health status. But it might miss other aspects, such as cultural influences or personal beliefs, that can also significantly impact dietary choices.

When writing about this limitation, you can say that your quantitative approach, while providing precise measurements and comparisons, may not capture the full complexity of your subjects of study.

Suggested Solution and Response: Suggest a follow-up case study using the same research participants in order to gain additional context and depth.

2. Lack of Context

Another potential issue with quantitative research is that it often focuses on numbers and statistics at the expense of context or qualitative information.

Let’s say you’re studying the effect of classroom size on student performance. You might find that students in smaller classes generally perform better. However, this doesn’t take into account other variables, like teaching style , student motivation, or family support.

When describing this limitation, you might say, “Although our research provides important insights into the relationship between class size and student performance, it does not incorporate the impact of other potentially influential variables. Future research could benefit from a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative analysis with qualitative insights.”

3. Applicability to Real-World Settings

Oftentimes, experimental research takes place in controlled environments to limit the influence of outside factors.

This control is great for isolation and understanding the specific phenomenon but can limit the applicability or “external validity” of the research to real-world settings.

For example, if you conduct a lab experiment to see how sleep deprivation impacts cognitive performance, the sterile, controlled lab environment might not reflect real-world conditions where people are dealing with multiple stressors.

Therefore, when explaining the limitations of your quantitative study in your methodology section, you could state:

“While our findings provide valuable information about [topic], the controlled conditions of the experiment may not accurately represent real-world scenarios where extraneous variables will exist. As such, the direct applicability of our results to broader contexts may be limited.”

Suggested Solution and Response: Suggest future studies that will engage in real-world observational research, such as ethnographic research.

4. Limited Flexibility

Once a quantitative study is underway, it can be challenging to make changes to it. This is because, unlike in grounded research, you’re putting in place your study in advance, and you can’t make changes part-way through.

Your study design, data collection methods, and analysis techniques need to be decided upon before you start collecting data.

For example, if you are conducting a survey on the impact of social media on teenage mental health, and halfway through, you realize that you should have included a question about their screen time, it’s generally too late to add it.

When discussing this limitation, you could write something like, “The structured nature of our quantitative approach allows for consistent data collection and analysis but also limits our flexibility to adapt and modify the research process in response to emerging insights and ideas.”

Suggested Solution and Response: Suggest future studies that will use mixed-methods or qualitative research methods to gain additional depth of insight.

5. Risk of Survey Error

Surveys are a common tool in quantitative research, but they carry risks of error.

There can be measurement errors (if a question is misunderstood), coverage errors (if some groups aren’t adequately represented), non-response errors (if certain people don’t respond), and sampling errors (if your sample isn’t representative of the population).

For instance, if you’re surveying college students about their study habits , but only daytime students respond because you conduct the survey during the day, your results will be skewed.

In discussing this limitation, you might say, “Despite our best efforts to develop a comprehensive survey, there remains a risk of survey error, including measurement, coverage, non-response, and sampling errors. These could potentially impact the reliability and generalizability of our findings.”

Suggested Solution and Response: Suggest future studies that will use other survey tools to compare and contrast results.

6. Limited Ability to Probe Answers

With quantitative research, you typically can’t ask follow-up questions or delve deeper into participants’ responses like you could in a qualitative interview.

For instance, imagine you are surveying 500 students about study habits in a questionnaire. A respondent might indicate that they study for two hours each night. You might want to follow up by asking them to elaborate on what those study sessions involve or how effective they feel their habits are.

However, quantitative research generally disallows this in the way a qualitative semi-structured interview could.

When discussing this limitation, you might write, “Given the structured nature of our survey, our ability to probe deeper into individual responses is limited. This means we may not fully understand the context or reasoning behind the responses, potentially limiting the depth of our findings.”

Suggested Solution and Response: Suggest future studies that engage in mixed-method or qualitative methodologies to address the issue from another angle.

7. Reliance on Instruments for Data Collection

In quantitative research, the collection of data heavily relies on instruments like questionnaires, surveys, or machines.

The limitation here is that the data you get is only as good as the instrument you’re using. If the instrument isn’t designed or calibrated well, your data can be flawed.

For instance, if you’re using a questionnaire to study customer satisfaction and the questions are vague, confusing, or biased, the responses may not accurately reflect the customers’ true feelings.

When discussing this limitation, you could say, “Our study depends on the use of questionnaires for data collection. Although we have put significant effort into designing and testing the instrument, it’s possible that inaccuracies or misunderstandings could potentially affect the validity of the data collected.”

Suggested Solution and Response: Suggest future studies that will use different instruments but examine the same variables to triangulate results.

8. Time and Resource Constraints (Specific to Quantitative Research)

Quantitative research can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, especially when dealing with large samples.

It often involves systematic sampling, rigorous design, and sometimes complex statistical analysis.

If resources and time are limited, it can restrict the scale of your research, the techniques you can employ, or the extent of your data analysis.

For example, you may want to conduct a nationwide survey on public opinion about a certain policy. However, due to limited resources, you might only be able to survey people in one city.

When writing about this limitation, you could say, “Given the scope of our research and the resources available, we are limited to conducting our survey within one city, which may not fully represent the nationwide public opinion. Hence, the generalizability of the results may be limited.”

Suggested Solution and Response: Suggest future studies that will have more funding or longer timeframes.

How to Discuss Your Research Limitations

1. in your research proposal and methodology section.

In the research proposal, which will become the methodology section of your dissertation, I would recommend taking the four following steps, in order:

• Be Explicit about your Scope – If you limit the scope of your study in your research question, aims, and objectives, then you can set yourself up well later in the methodology to say that certain questions are “outside the scope of the study.” For example, you may identify the fact that the study doesn’t address a certain variable, but you can follow up by stating that the research question is specifically focused on the variable that you are examining, so this limitation would need to be looked at in future studies.
• Acknowledge the Limitation – Acknowledging the limitations of your study demonstrates reflexivity and humility and can make your research more reliable and valid. It also pre-empts questions the people grading your paper may have, so instead of them down-grading you for your limitations; they will congratulate you on explaining the limitations and how you have addressed them!
• Explain your Decisions – You may have chosen your approach (despite its limitations) for a very specific reason. This might be because your approach remains, on balance, the best one to answer your research question. Or, it might be because of time and monetary constraints that are outside of your control.
• Highlight the Strengths of your Approach – Conclude your limitations section by strongly demonstrating that, despite limitations, you’ve worked hard to minimize the effects of the limitations and that you have chosen your specific approach and methodology because it’s also got some terrific strengths. Name the strengths.

Overall, you’ll want to acknowledge your own limitations but also explain that the limitations don’t detract from the value of your study as it stands.

2. In the Conclusion Section or Chapter

In the conclusion of your study, it is generally expected that you return to a discussion of the study’s limitations. Here, I recommend the following steps:

• Acknowledge issues faced – After completing your study, you will be increasingly aware of issues you may have faced that, if you re-did the study, you may have addressed earlier in order to avoid those issues. Acknowledge these issues as limitations, and frame them as recommendations for subsequent studies.
• Suggest further research – Scholarly research aims to fill gaps in the current literature and knowledge. Having established your expertise through your study, suggest lines of inquiry for future researchers. You could state that your study had certain limitations, and “future studies” can address those limitations.
• Suggest a mixed methods approach – Qualitative and quantitative research each have pros and cons. So, note those ‘cons’ of your approach, then say the next study should approach the topic using the opposite methodology or could approach it using a mixed-methods approach that could achieve the benefits of quantitative studies with the nuanced insights of associated qualitative insights as part of an in-study case-study.

Overall, be clear about both your limitations and how those limitations can inform future studies.

In sum, each type of research method has its own strengths and limitations. Qualitative research excels in exploring depth, context, and complexity, while quantitative research excels in examining breadth, generalizability, and quantifiable measures. Despite their individual limitations, each method contributes unique and valuable insights, and researchers often use them together to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon being studied.

Attride-Stirling, J. (2001). Thematic networks: an analytic tool for qualitative research. Qualitative research , 1 (3), 385-405. ( Source )

Atkinson, P., Delamont, S., Cernat, A., Sakshaug, J., & Williams, R. A. (2021).  SAGE research methods foundations . London: Sage Publications.

Clark, T., Foster, L., Bryman, A., & Sloan, L. (2021).  Bryman’s social research methods . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Köhler, T., Smith, A., & Bhakoo, V. (2022). Templates in qualitative research methods: Origins, limitations, and new directions.  Organizational Research Methods ,  25 (2), 183-210. ( Source )

Lenger, A. (2019). The rejection of qualitative research methods in economics.  Journal of Economic Issues ,  53 (4), 946-965. ( Source )

Taherdoost, H. (2022). What are different research approaches? Comprehensive review of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method research, their applications, types, and limitations.  Journal of Management Science & Engineering Research ,  5 (1), 53-63. ( Source )

Walliman, N. (2021).  Research methods: The basics . New York: Routledge.

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Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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• The role of limitations in research: why they are important
• How to Organize Limitations of a Research Study

What are the Limitations of a Study (Research)?

Why and where to include limitations in my research paper, common limitations of the researchers.

• Limited Access to Information

Time Limits

Conflicts on biased views and personal issues, different types, 1. research design limitations, 2. impact limitations, 3. data or statistical limitations, how to structure your research limitations correctly, how to set your research limitations, formulation of your objectives and aims, implementation of your data collection methods, what are sample sizes, lacking previous studies in the same field, scope of discussions, concluding thoughts.

When completing a study or any other important work, there are different details that you should include to present its comprehensive and clear description. Sometimes you might even need to hire a thesis writer to help you with the whole writing process. Don’t underrate the section with limitations in research . It plays a big role in the entire process. Some students find it difficult to write this part, while others are reluctant to include it in their academic papers. Don’t underestimate the significance of limitations in research to provide readers with an accurate context of your work and enough data to evaluate the impact and relevance of your results. What is the best way to go about them? Keep reading to find out more.

Every research has its limitations. These limitations can appear due to constraints on methodology or research design. Needless to say, this may impact your whole study or research paper. Most researchers prefer to not discuss their study limitations because they think it may decrease the value of their paper in the eyes of the audience.

Remember that it’s quite important to show your study limitations to your audience (other researchers, editors of journals, and public readers). You need to notice that you know about these limitations and about the impact they may have. It’s important to give an explanation of how your research limitations can affect the conclusions and thoughts drawn from your research. 

In this guide, you can read useful tips on how to write limitations on your future research. Read great techniques on making a proper limitations section and see examples to make sure you have got an idea of writing your qualitative research limitations. You need to understand that even if limitations show the weaknesses of your future research, including them in your study can make your paper strengthen because you show all the problems before your readers will discover them by themselves. 

Apart from this, when the author points out the study limitations, it means that you have researched all the weak sides of your study and you understand the topic deeply. Needless to say, all the studies have their limitations even if you know how to make research design properly. When you’re honest with your readers, it can impress people much better than ignoring limitations at all.

Every research has certain limitations, and it’s completely normal, but you need to minimize their range of scope in the process. Provide your acknowledgment of them in the conclusion. Identify and understand potential shortcomings in your work.

When discussing limitations in research, explain how they impact your findings because creating their short list or description isn’t enough. Your research may have many limitations. Your basic goal is to discuss the ones that relate to the research questions that you choose for a specific academic assignment.

Limitations of your qualitative research can become clear to your readers even before they start to read your study. Sometimes, people can see the limitations only when they have viewed the whole document. You have to present your study limitations clearly in the Discussion section of a researh paper . This is the final part of your work where it’s logical to place the limitations section. You should write the limitations at the very beginning of this paragraph, just after you have highlighted the strong sides of the research methodology. When you discuss the limitations before the findings are analyzed, it will help to see how to qualify and apply these findings in future research.   

Limitations related to the researcher must also be written and shown to readers. You have to provide suggestions on decreasing these limitations in both your and future studies.

Limited Access to Information 

Your study may involve some organizations and people in the research, and sometimes you may get problems with access to these organizations. Due to this, you need to redesign and rewrite your study. You need to explain the cause of limited access to your readers.

Needless to say, all the researchers have their deadlines when they need to complete their studies. Sometimes, time constraints can affect your research negatively. If this happened, you need to acknowledge it and mention a need for future research to solve the main problem. 

Some researchers can have biased views because of their cultural background or personal views. Needless to say, it can affect the research. Apart from this, researchers with biased views can choose only those results and data that support their main arguments. If you want to avoid this problem, pay your attention to the problem statement and proper data gathering.

Before you start your study or work, keep in mind that there are specific limitations to what you test or possible research results. What are their types? There are different types that students may encounter and they all have unique features, including:

• Research design limitations,
• Impact limitations,
• Data or statistical limitations.

Specific constraints on your population research or available procedures may affect the final outcomes or results that you obtain.

Even if your research has excellent stats and a strong design, it may suffer from the impact of such factors as:

• The field is conductive to incremental findings,
• Being too population-specific.
• A strong regional focus.

In some cases, it’s impossible to collect enough data or enrollment is very difficult, and all that under-powers your research results. They may stem from your study design. They produce more issues in interpreting your findings.

There are strict rules to structure this section of your academic paper where you need to justify and explain its potential weaknesses. Take these basic steps to end up with a well-structured section:

• Announce to identify your research limitations and explain their importance,
• Reflect to provide the necessary depth, explain their nature, and justify your study choices,
• Look forward to suggest how it’s possible to overcome them in the future.

They walk your readers through this section. You need them to make it clear to your target audience that you recognize potential weaknesses in your work, understand them, and can point effective solutions.

No one is perfect. It means that your work isn’t beyond possible flaws, but you need to use them as a great opportunity to overcome new challenges and improve your knowledge. In a typical academic paper, research limitations can relate to these points:

• Formulation of your objectives and aims,
• Implementation of your data collection methods,
• Sample sizes,
• Lack of previous studies in your chosen area,
• The scope of discussions.

Learn to determine them in each one.

Your work has certain shortcomings if you formulate objectives and aims in a very broad manner. What to do in this case? Specify effective methods or ways to narrow your formulation of objectives and aims to increase the level of your study focus.

If you don’t have a lot of experience in collecting primary data, there’s a certain risk that the implementation of your methods has flaws. It’s necessary to acknowledge that.

They depend on the nature of your chosen problem and their significance is bigger in quantitative studies, unlike the qualitative ones. If your sample size is very small, statistical tests will fail to identify important relationships or connections within a particular data set. How to solve this problem? State that other researchers need to base the same study on a larger sample size to end up with more accurate results. To find more information on how to identify a resesrch problem , check our guide. 

Writing a literature review is a key step in any scientific work because it helps students determine the scope of existing studies in the chosen area. Why should you use the literature review findings? They are a basic foundation for any researcher who must use them to achieve a set of specific objectives or aims. What if there are no previous works? You may face this challenge if you choose an evolving or current problem for your study or if it’s very narrow.

Feel free to include this point as a shortcoming of your work, no matter what your chosen area is. Why? The main reason is that you don’t have long years of experience in writing scientific papers or completing complex studies. That’s why the depth and scope of your discussions can be compromised in different levels compared to scholars with a lot of expertise. Include certain points from limitations in research. Use them as suggestions for the future.

Any research suffers from specific limitations that range from common flaws to serious problems in design or methodology dissertation has. The ability to set these shortcomings plays a huge role in writing a successful academic paper and earning good grades. What if you lack it? Turn to our professional thesis writers and get their expert consultation on thesis or research paper.

What comes first, the research design or research problem selection? Read on this guide from our dissertation writing service if you are struggling to answer this question. Any research paper is based on the hypothesis, datum, and methodology. These things though are not written down in the instruct...

The methodology is an important part of your dissertation. It describes a broad philosophical underpinning to your chosen research methods, either quantitative or qualitative, to explain to readers your approach better. Make sure that you’re clear about an academic basis for your choice of research ...

Students have to complete different writing assignments, and some of them are utterly complex. Every assignment has the central idea or problem, which is supposed to be discussed and analyzed during the entire work. It’s called a thesis statement. The main objective of the statement is to explain to...

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Scope and Delimitations – Explained & Example

• By DiscoverPhDs
• October 2, 2020

What Is Scope and Delimitation in Research?

The scope and delimitations of a thesis, dissertation or research paper define the topic and boundaries of the research problem to be investigated.

The scope details how in-depth your study is to explore the research question and the parameters in which it will operate in relation to the population and timeframe.

The delimitations of a study are the factors and variables not to be included in the investigation. In other words, they are the boundaries the researcher sets in terms of study duration, population size and type of participants, etc.

Difference Between Delimitations and Limitations

Delimitations refer to the boundaries of the research study, based on the researcher’s decision of what to include and what to exclude. They narrow your study to make it more manageable and relevant to what you are trying to prove.

Limitations relate to the validity and reliability of the study. They are characteristics of the research design or methodology that are out of your control but influence your research findings. Because of this, they determine the internal and external validity of your study and are considered potential weaknesses.

In other words, limitations are what the researcher cannot do (elements outside of their control) and delimitations are what the researcher will not do (elements outside of the boundaries they have set). Both are important because they help to put the research findings into context, and although they explain how the study is limited, they increase the credibility and validity of a research project.

Guidelines on How to Write a Scope

A good scope statement will answer the following six questions:

• Why – the general aims and objectives (purpose) of the research.
• What – the subject to be investigated, and the included variables.
• Where – the location or setting of the study, i.e. where the data will be gathered and to which entity the data will belong.
• When – the timeframe within which the data is to be collected.
• Who – the subject matter of the study and the population from which they will be selected. This population needs to be large enough to be able to make generalisations.
• How – how the research is to be conducted, including a description of the research design (e.g. whether it is experimental research, qualitative research or a case study), methodology, research tools and analysis techniques.

To make things as clear as possible, you should also state why specific variables were omitted from the research scope, and whether this was because it was a delimitation or a limitation. You should also explain why they could not be overcome with standard research methods backed up by scientific evidence.

How to Start Writing Your Study Scope

Use the below prompts as an effective way to start writing your scope:

• This study is to focus on…
• This study covers the…
• This study aims to…

Guidelines on How to Write Delimitations

Since the delimitation parameters are within the researcher’s control, readers need to know why they were set, what alternative options were available, and why these alternatives were rejected. For example, if you are collecting data that can be derived from three different but similar experiments, the reader needs to understand how and why you decided to select the one you have.

Your reasons should always be linked back to your research question, as all delimitations should result from trying to make your study more relevant to your scope. Therefore, the scope and delimitations are usually considered together when writing a paper.

How to Start Writing Your Study Delimitations

Use the below prompts as an effective way to start writing your study delimitations:

• This study does not cover…
• This study is limited to…
• The following has been excluded from this study…

Examples of Delimitation in Research

Examples of delimitations include:

• research objectives,
• research questions,
• research variables,
• target populations,
• statistical analysis techniques .

Examples of Limitations in Research

Examples of limitations include:

• Issues with sample and selection,
• Insufficient sample size, population traits or specific participants for statistical significance,
• Lack of previous research studies on the topic which has allowed for further analysis,
• Limitations in the technology/instruments used to collect your data,
• Limited financial resources and/or funding constraints.

Multistage sampling is a more complex form of cluster sampling for obtaining sample populations. Learn their pros and cons and how to undertake them.

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• Knowledge Base
• Dissertation

How to Write a Thesis or Dissertation Conclusion

Published on September 6, 2022 by Tegan George and Shona McCombes. Revised on November 20, 2023.

The conclusion is the very last part of your thesis or dissertation . It should be concise and engaging, leaving your reader with a clear understanding of your main findings, as well as the answer to your research question .

In it, you should:

• Clearly state the answer to your main research question
• Summarize and reflect on your research process
• Make recommendations for future work on your thesis or dissertation topic
• Show what new knowledge you have contributed to your field
• Wrap up your thesis or dissertation

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Table of contents

Discussion vs. conclusion, how long should your conclusion be, step 1: answer your research question, step 2: summarize and reflect on your research, step 3: make future recommendations, step 4: emphasize your contributions to your field, step 5: wrap up your thesis or dissertation, full conclusion example, conclusion checklist, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about conclusion sections.

While your conclusion contains similar elements to your discussion section , they are not the same thing.

Your conclusion should be shorter and more general than your discussion. Instead of repeating literature from your literature review , discussing specific research results , or interpreting your data in detail, concentrate on making broad statements that sum up the most important insights of your research.

As a rule of thumb, your conclusion should not introduce new data, interpretations, or arguments.

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Depending on whether you are writing a thesis or dissertation, your length will vary. Generally, a conclusion should make up around 5–7% of your overall word count.

An empirical scientific study will often have a short conclusion, concisely stating the main findings and recommendations for future research. A humanities dissertation topic or systematic review , on the other hand, might require more space to conclude its analysis, tying all the previous sections together in an overall argument.

Your conclusion should begin with the main question that your thesis or dissertation aimed to address. This is your final chance to show that you’ve done what you set out to do, so make sure to formulate a clear, concise answer.

• Don’t repeat a list of all the results that you already discussed
• Do synthesize them into a final takeaway that the reader will remember.

An empirical thesis or dissertation conclusion may begin like this:

A case study –based thesis or dissertation conclusion may begin like this:

In the second example, the research aim is not directly restated, but rather added implicitly to the statement. To avoid repeating yourself, it is helpful to reformulate your aims and questions into an overall statement of what you did and how you did it.

Your conclusion is an opportunity to remind your reader why you took the approach you did, what you expected to find, and how well the results matched your expectations.

To avoid repetition , consider writing more reflectively here, rather than just writing a summary of each preceding section. Consider mentioning the effectiveness of your methodology , or perhaps any new questions or unexpected insights that arose in the process.

You can also mention any limitations of your research, but only if you haven’t already included these in the discussion. Don’t dwell on them at length, though—focus on the positives of your work.

• While x limits the generalizability of the results, this approach provides new insight into y .
• This research clearly illustrates x , but it also raises the question of y .

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You may already have made a few recommendations for future research in your discussion section, but the conclusion is a good place to elaborate and look ahead, considering the implications of your findings in both theoretical and practical terms.

• Based on these conclusions, practitioners should consider …
• To better understand the implications of these results, future studies could address …
• Further research is needed to determine the causes of/effects of/relationship between …

When making recommendations for further research, be sure not to undermine your own work. Relatedly, while future studies might confirm, build on, or enrich your conclusions, they shouldn’t be required for your argument to feel complete. Your work should stand alone on its own merits.

Just as you should avoid too much self-criticism, you should also avoid exaggerating the applicability of your research. If you’re making recommendations for policy, business, or other practical implementations, it’s generally best to frame them as “shoulds” rather than “musts.” All in all, the purpose of academic research is to inform, explain, and explore—not to demand.

Make sure your reader is left with a strong impression of what your research has contributed to the state of your field.

Some strategies to achieve this include:

• Returning to your problem statement to explain how your research helps solve the problem
• Referring back to the literature review and showing how you have addressed a gap in knowledge
• Discussing how your findings confirm or challenge an existing theory or assumption

Again, avoid simply repeating what you’ve already covered in the discussion in your conclusion. Instead, pick out the most important points and sum them up succinctly, situating your project in a broader context.

The end is near! Once you’ve finished writing your conclusion, it’s time to wrap up your thesis or dissertation with a few final steps:

• It’s a good idea to write your abstract next, while the research is still fresh in your mind.
• Next, make sure your reference list is complete and correctly formatted. To speed up the process, you can use our free APA citation generator .
• Once you’ve added any appendices , you can create a table of contents and title page .
• Finally, read through the whole document again to make sure your thesis is clearly written and free from language errors. You can proofread it yourself , ask a friend, or consider Scribbr’s proofreading and editing service .

Here is an example of how you can write your conclusion section. Notice how it includes everything mentioned above:

V. Conclusion

The current research aimed to identify acoustic speech characteristics which mark the beginning of an exacerbation in COPD patients.

The central questions for this research were as follows: 1. Which acoustic measures extracted from read speech differ between COPD speakers in stable condition and healthy speakers? 2. In what ways does the speech of COPD patients during an exacerbation differ from speech of COPD patients during stable periods?

All recordings were aligned using a script. Subsequently, they were manually annotated to indicate respiratory actions such as inhaling and exhaling. The recordings of 9 stable COPD patients reading aloud were then compared with the recordings of 5 healthy control subjects reading aloud. The results showed a significant effect of condition on the number of in- and exhalations per syllable, the number of non-linguistic in- and exhalations per syllable, and the ratio of voiced and silence intervals. The number of in- and exhalations per syllable and the number of non-linguistic in- and exhalations per syllable were higher for COPD patients than for healthy controls, which confirmed both hypotheses.

However, the higher ratio of voiced and silence intervals for COPD patients compared to healthy controls was not in line with the hypotheses. This unpredicted result might have been caused by the different reading materials or recording procedures for both groups, or by a difference in reading skills. Moreover, there was a trend regarding the effect of condition on the number of syllables per breath group. The number of syllables per breath group was higher for healthy controls than for COPD patients, which was in line with the hypothesis. There was no effect of condition on pitch, intensity, center of gravity, pitch variability, speaking rate, or articulation rate.

This research has shown that the speech of COPD patients in exacerbation differs from the speech of COPD patients in stable condition. This might have potential for the detection of exacerbations. However, sustained vowels rarely occur in spontaneous speech. Therefore, the last two outcome measures might have greater potential for the detection of beginning exacerbations, but further research on the different outcome measures and their potential for the detection of exacerbations is needed due to the limitations of the current study.

Checklist: Conclusion

I have clearly and concisely answered the main research question .

I have summarized my overall argument or key takeaways.

I have mentioned any important limitations of the research.

I have given relevant recommendations .

I have clearly explained what my research has contributed to my field.

I have  not introduced any new data or arguments.

You've written a great conclusion! Use the other checklists to further improve your dissertation.

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or research bias, make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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In a thesis or dissertation, the discussion is an in-depth exploration of the results, going into detail about the meaning of your findings and citing relevant sources to put them in context.

The conclusion is more shorter and more general: it concisely answers your main research question and makes recommendations based on your overall findings.

While it may be tempting to present new arguments or evidence in your thesis or disseration conclusion , especially if you have a particularly striking argument you’d like to finish your analysis with, you shouldn’t. Theses and dissertations follow a more formal structure than this.

All your findings and arguments should be presented in the body of the text (more specifically in the discussion section and results section .) The conclusion is meant to summarize and reflect on the evidence and arguments you have already presented, not introduce new ones.

For a stronger dissertation conclusion , avoid including:

• Important evidence or analysis that wasn’t mentioned in the discussion section and results section
• Generic concluding phrases (e.g. “In conclusion …”)
• Weak statements that undermine your argument (e.g., “There are good points on both sides of this issue.”)

Your conclusion should leave the reader with a strong, decisive impression of your work.

The conclusion of your thesis or dissertation shouldn’t take up more than 5–7% of your overall word count.

The conclusion of your thesis or dissertation should include the following:

• A restatement of your research question
• A summary of your key arguments and/or results
• A short discussion of the implications of your research

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How To Write Scope and Delimitation of a Research Paper (With Examples)

An effective research paper or thesis has a well-written Scope and Delimitation.  This portion specifies your study’s coverage and boundaries.

Not yet sure about how to write your research’s Scope and Delimitation? Fret not, as we’ll guide you through the entire writing process through this article.

Related: How To Write Significance of the Study (With Examples)

Table of Contents

What is the scope and delimitation of a research paper.

The “Scope and Delimitation” section states the concepts and variables your study covered. It tells readers which things you have included and excluded in your analysis.

This portion tells two things: 1

• The study’s “Scope” – concepts and variables you have explored in your research and;
• The study’s “Delimitation” – the “boundaries” of your study’s scope. It sets apart the things included in your analysis from those excluded.

For example, your scope might be the effectiveness of plant leaves in lowering blood sugar levels. You can “delimit” your study only to the effect of gabi leaves on the blood glucose of Swiss mice.

Where Should I Put the Scope and Delimitation?

This portion is in Chapter 1, usually after the “Background of the Study.”

Why Should I Write the Scope and Delimitation of My Research Paper?

There’s a lot to discover in a research paper or thesis. However, your resources and time dedicated to it are scarce. Thus, given these constraints, you have to narrow down your study. You do this in the Scope and Delimitation.

Suppose you’re studying the correlation between the quantity of organic fertilizer and plant growth . Experimenting with several types of plants is impossible because of several limitations. So, you’ve decided to use one plant type only. 

Informing your readers about this decision is a must. So, you have to state it in your Scope and Delimitation. It also acts as a “disclaimer” that your results are inapplicable to the entire plant kingdom.

What Is the Difference Between Delimitation and Limitation?

People often use the terms “Delimitation” and “Limitation” interchangeably. However, these words differ 2 .

Delimitation refers to factors you set to limit your analysis. It delineates those that are included in your research and those that are excluded. Remember, delimitations are within your control. 

Meanwhile, limitations are factors beyond your control that may affect your research’s results.  You can think of limitations as the “weaknesses” of your study. 

Let’s go back to our previous example. Due to some constraints, you’ve only decided to examine one plant type: dandelions. This is an example of a delimitation since it limits your analysis to dandelions only and not other plant types. Note that the number of plant types used is within your control. 

Meanwhile, your study cannot state that a higher quantity of organic fertilizer is the sole reason for plant growth. That’s because your research’s focus is only on correlation. Since this is already beyond your control, then this is a limitation. 

How To Write Scope and Delimitation: Step-by-Step Guide

To write your research’s Scope and Delimitation section, follow these steps:

1. Review Your Study’s Objectives and Problem Statement

Your study’s coverage relies on its objectives. Thus, you can only write this section if you know what you’re researching. Furthermore, ensure that you understand the problems you ought to answer. 

Once you understand the abovementioned things, you may start writing your study’s Scope and Delimitation.

2. State the Key Information To Explain Your Study’s Coverage and Boundaries

a. The Main Objective of the Research

This refers to the concept that you’re focusing on in your research. Some examples are the following:

• level of awareness or satisfaction of a particular group of people
• correlation between two variables
• effectiveness of a new product
• comparison between two methods/approaches
• lived experiences of several individuals

It’s helpful to consult your study’s Objectives or Statement of the Problem section to determine your research’s primary goal.

b. Independent and Dependent Variables Included

Your study’s independent variable is the variable that you manipulate. Meanwhile, the dependent variable is the variable whose result depends upon the independent variable. Both of these variables must be clear and specific when indicated. 

Suppose you study the relationship between social media usage and students’ language skills. These are the possible variables for the study:

• Independent Variable: Number of hours per day spent on using Facebook
• Dependent Variable: Grade 10 students’ scores in Quarterly Examination in English. 

Note how specific the variables stated above are. For the independent variable, we narrow it down to Facebook only. Since there are many ways to assess “language skills,” we zero in on the students’ English exam scores as our dependent variable. 

c. Subject of the Study

This refers to your study’s respondents or participants. 

In our previous example, the research participants are Grade 10 students. However, there are a lot of Grade 10 students in the Philippines. Thus, we have to select from a specific school only—for instance, Grade 10 students from a national high school in Manila. 

d. Timeframe and Location of the Study

Specify the month(s), quarter(s), or year(s) as the duration of your study. Also, indicate where you will gather the data required for your research. 

e. Brief Description of the Study’s Research Design and Methodology

You may also include whether your research is quantitative or qualitative, the sampling method (cluster, stratified, purposive) applied, and how you conducted the experiment.

Using our previous example, the Grade 10 students can be selected using stratified sampling. Afterward, the researchers may obtain their English quarterly exam scores from their respective teachers. You can add these things to your study’s Scope and Delimitation. 

3. Indicate Which Variables or Factors Are Not Covered by Your Research

Although you’ve already set your study’s coverage and boundaries in Step 2, you may also explicitly mention things you’ve excluded from your research. 

Returning to our previous example, you can state that your assessment will not include the vocabulary and oral aspects of the English proficiency skill. 

Examples of Scope and Delimitation of a Research Paper

1. scope and delimitation examples for quantitative research.

a. Example 1

Research Title

    A Study on the Relationship of the Extent of Facebook Usage on the English Proficiency Level of Grade 10 Students of Matagumpay High School

Scope and Delimitation

(Main Objective)

This study assessed the correlation between the respondents’ duration of Facebook usage and their English proficiency level. 

(Variables used)

The researchers used the number of hours per day of using Facebook and the activities usually performed on the platform to assess the respondents’ extent of Facebook usage. Meanwhile, the respondents’ English proficiency level is limited to their quarterly English exam scores. 

(Subject of the study)

A sample of fifty (50) Grade 10 students of Matagumpay High School served as the study’s respondents. 

(Timeframe and location)

This study was conducted during the Second Semester of the School Year 2018 – 2019 on the premises of Matagumpay High School in Metro Manila. 

(Methodology)

The respondents are selected by performing stratified random sampling to ensure that there will be ten respondents from five Grade 10 classes of the school mentioned above. The researchers administered a 20-item questionnaire to assess the extent of Facebook usage of the selected respondents. Meanwhile, the data for the respondents’ quarterly exam scores were acquired from their English teachers. The collected data are handled with the utmost confidentiality. Spearman’s Rank Order Correlation was applied to quantitatively assess the correlation between the variables.

(Exclusions)

This study didn’t assess other aspects of the respondents’ English proficiency, such as English vocabulary and oral skills. 

Note: The words inside the parentheses in the example above are guides only. They are not included in the actual text.

b. Example 2

  Level of Satisfaction of Grade 11 Students on the Implementation of the Online Learning Setup of Matagumpay High School for SY 2020 – 2021

This study aims to identify students’ satisfaction levels with implementing online learning setups during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Students’ satisfaction was assessed according to teachers’ pedagogy, school policies, and learning materials used in the online learning setup. The respondents included sixty (60) Grade 11 students of Matagumpay High School who were randomly picked. The researchers conducted the study from October 2020 to February 2021. 

Online platforms such as email and social media applications were used to reach the respondents. The researchers administered a 15-item online questionnaire to measure the respondents’ satisfaction levels. Each response was assessed using a Likert Scale to provide a descriptive interpretation of their answers. A weighted mean was applied to determine the respondents’ general satisfaction. 

This study did not cover other factors related to the online learning setup, such as the learning platform used, the schedule of synchronous learning, and channels for information dissemination.

2. Scope and Delimitation Examples for Qualitative Research

  Lived Experiences of Public Utility Vehicle (PUV) Drivers of Antipolo City Amidst the Continuous June 2022 Oil Price Hikes

This research focused on the presentation and discussion of the lived experiences of PUV drivers during the constant oil price hike in June 2022.

The respondents involved are five (5) jeepney drivers from Antipolo City who agreed to be interviewed. The researchers assessed their experiences in terms of the following: (1) daily net income; (2) duration and extent of working; (3) alternative employment opportunity considerations; and (4) mental and emotional status. The respondents were interviewed daily at their stations on June 6 – 10, 2022. 

In-depth one-on-one interviews were used for data collection.  Afterward, the respondents’ first-hand experiences were drafted and annotated with the researchers’ insights. 

The researchers excluded some factors in determining the respondents’ experiences, such as physical and health conditions and current family relationship status. 

 A Study on the Perception of the Residents of Mayamot, Antipolo City on the Political and Socioeconomic Conditions During the Post-EDSA Period (1986 – 1996)

This research aims to discuss the perception of Filipinos regarding the political and socioeconomic economic conditions during the post-EDSA period, specifically during the years 1986 – 1996. 

Ten (10) residents of Mayamot, Antipolo City, who belonged to Generation X (currently 40 – 62 years old), were purposively selected as the study’s respondents. The researchers asked them about their perception of the following aspects during the period mentioned above (1) performance of national and local government; (2) bureaucracy and government services; (3) personal economic and financial status; and (4) wage purchasing power. 

The researchers conducted face-to-face interviews in the respondents’ residences during the second semester of AY 2018 – 2019. The responses were written and corroborated with the literature on the post-EDSA period. 

The following factors were not included in the research analysis: political conflicts and turmoils, the status of the legislative and judicial departments, and other macroeconomic indicators. 

Tips and Warnings

1. use the “5ws and 1h” as your guide in understanding your study’s coverage.

• Why did you write your study?  
• What variables are included?
• Who are your study’s subject
• Where did you conduct the study?
• When did your study start and end?
• How did you conduct the study?

2. Use key phrases when writing your research’s scope

• This study aims to … 
• This study primarily focuses on …
• This study deals with … 
• This study will cover …
• This study will be confined…

3. Use key phrases when writing factors beyond your research’s delimitations

• The researcher(s) decided to exclude …
• This study did not cover….
• This study excluded … 
• These variables/factors were excluded from the study…

4. Don’t forget to ask for help

Your research adviser can assist you in selecting specific concepts and variables suitable to your study. Make sure to consult him/her regularly. 

5. Make it brief

No need to make this section wordy. You’re good to go if you meet the “5Ws and 1Hs”. 

Frequently Asked Questions

1. what are scope and delimitation in tagalog.

In a Filipino research ( pananaliksik ), Scope and Delimitation is called “ Saklaw at Delimitasyon”. 

Here’s an example of Scope and Delimitation in Filipino:

Pamagat ng Pananaliksik

Epekto Ng Paggamit Ng Mga Digital Learning Tools Sa Pag-Aaral Ng Mga Mag-Aaral Ng Mataas Na Paaralan Ng Matagumpay Sa General Mathematics

Sakop at Delimitasyon ng Pag-aaral

Nakatuon ang pananaliksik na ito sa epekto ng paggamit ng mga digital learning aids sa pag-aaral ng mga mag-aaral.

Ang mga digital learning tools na kinonsidera sa pag-aaral na ito ay Google Classroom, Edmodo, Kahoot, at mga piling bidyo mula YouTube. Samantala, ang epekto sa pag-aaral ng mga mag-aaral ng mga nabanggit na digital learning tools ay natukoy sa pamamagitan ng kanilang (1) mga pananaw hinggil sa benepisyo nito sa kanilang pag-aaral sa General Mathematics at (2) kanilang average grade sa asignaturang ito.

Dalawampu’t-limang (25) mag-aaral mula sa Senior High School ng Mataas na Paaralan ng Matagumpay ang pinili para sa pananaliksik na ito. Sila ay na-interbyu at binigyan ng questionnaire noong Enero 2022 sa nasabing paaralan. Sinuri ang resulta ng pananaliksik sa pamamagitan ng mga instrumentong estadistikal na weighted mean at Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). Hindi saklaw ng pananaliksik na ito ang ibang mga aspeto hinggil sa epekto ng online learning aids sa pag-aaral gaya ng lebel ng pag-unawa sa aralin at kakayahang iugnay ito sa araw-araw na buhay. 

2. The Scope and Delimitation should consist of how many paragraphs?

Three or more paragraphs will suffice for your study’s Scope and Delimitation. Here’s our suggestion on what you should write for each paragraph:

Paragraph 1: Introduction (state research objective) Paragraph 2: Coverage and boundaries of the research (you may divide this section into 2-3 paragraphs) Paragraph 3 : Factors excluded from the study

• University of St. La Salle. Unit 3: Lesson 3 Setting the Scope and Limitation of a Qualitative Research [Ebook] (p. 12). Retrieved from https://www.studocu.com/ph/document/university-of-st-la-salle/senior-high-school/final-sg-pr1-11-12-unit-3-lesson-3-setting-the-scope-and-limitation-of-a-qualitative-research/24341582
• Theofanidis, D., & Fountouki, A. (2018). Limitations and Delimitations in the Research Process. Perioperative Nursing (GORNA), 7(3), 155–162. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.2552022

Written by Jewel Kyle Fabula

in Career and Education , Juander How

Last Updated May 6, 2023 09:59 AM

Jewel Kyle Fabula

Jewel Kyle Fabula is a Bachelor of Science in Economics student at the University of the Philippines Diliman. His passion for learning mathematics developed as he competed in some mathematics competitions during his Junior High School years. He loves cats, playing video games, and listening to music.

Browse all articles written by Jewel Kyle Fabula

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2024 Theses Doctoral

Microfluidic Discovery of Aptamers for Monoclonal Antibodies and Recombinant Proteins toward Applications in Therapeutic Drug Monitoring and Protein Production Quality Control

Wen, Kechun

Affinity molecules can serve as precision tools for selective recognition and measurement of specific biomolecules in the fields of therapeutic drug monitoring and quality control in recombinant protein production. In therapeutic drug monitoring, affinity molecules can enable the accurate quantification of drug concentrations within physiological fluids, enhancing both the safety and efficacy of clinical treatments. In the realm of recombinant protein production, these molecules can allow precise isolation and measurement of desired recombinant proteins from complex mixtures by selectively targeting specific protein tags or domains, ensuring the consistency and purity of protein products. Currently, antibodies are most commonly used affinity reagents in these fields but are limited by production complexity, batch variability, high cost, and low stability. Aptamers, known as ‘chemical antibodies’ but composed of nucleotides, are considered potential next-generation affinity reagents. Aptamers are obtained via a synthetic process, termed SELEX, of iterative affinity selection and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification of target-binding members from a randomized oligonucleotide library. This process is traditionally labor and resource-intensive and time-consuming. In this thesis, microfluidic technology is employed to enable time-efficient and cost-effective generation of aptamers for monoclonal antibodies and recombinant proteins toward applications in therapeutic drug monitoring and quality control of recombinant protein production. This thesis starts with a comparative study of three SELEX strategies for aptamer isolation, including those using conventional agarose bead-based partitioning, microfluidic affinity selection (called “chip-selection SELEX”), and fully integrated microfluidic affinity selection and PCR amplification (termed “full-chip SELEX”). The comparison results indicate that chip-selection SELEX offers the lowest cost and highest efficiency in aptamer isolation. We then use chip-selection SELEX to streamline the process of isolating anti-idiotype aptamers targeting human monoclonal antibodies against spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 virus. The process is completed within only 5 rounds of SELEX within two days, which represented a significant improvement when compared to conventional methods whose completion generally requires more than 10 SELEX rounds in up to a month. These anti-idiotype aptamers are combined with a graphene-based affinity nanosensor to enable rapid antibody concentration measurements to inform therapeutic decisions in a timely manner. In addition, a microfluidic dual-aptamer sandwich assay with highly efficient isolation of aptamers is developed to enable rapid and cost-effective detection of tag-fused recombinant proteins. This approach addresses both the limitations of current dual-aptamer assays and commonly encountered difficulties in the lack of aptamers available for such assays, by first using chip-selection SELEX to generate aptamers and then employing these aptamers to implement a microfluidic dual-aptamer assay for quality control during recombinant protein production. Despite the high efficiency in aptamer isolation using chip-selection SELEX, the full-chip SELEX platform is still desired for minimal manual operation and reagent consumption. The current full-chip SELEX platform has low isolation efficiency and could not offer information of affinity selection process. Herein, by introducing asymmetric PCR into the full-chip SELEX process, we improve the efficiency in aptamer isolation and can successfully monitor the selection progress. This real-time monitoring capability allows us to identify the optimal point to terminate the SELEX process, preventing the potential loss of aptamer candidates and reducing the overall consumption of time and reagents. In addition, introducing solution phase-based asymmetric PCR addresses a notable technical challenge of on-chip PCR bead replenishment, toward complete automation of the full-chip SELEX platform. Furthermore, a holder equipped with connection pins is designed to enable the reversible connection between gold electrodes and electrical wires. This design promotes the reusability of gold electrode-deposited glass substrates, resulting in a substantial reduction in chip fabrication costs. In addition to the SELEX protocol development effort, we also present efficient and cost-effective microfluidic approaches for post-SELEX aptamer characterization, including aptamer identification and kinetic aptamer-target binding measurements. To mitigate the expensive and time-consuming nature of aptamer identification from SELEX-generated target-binding sequence pools, we present an approach that is based on a cost-effective and efficient procedure to generate modified single-stranded DNA copies of the aptamer candidates and then assess the affinity of the resulting modified ssDNA strands to target molecules. The approach is applied to identify aptamers from 12 candidates with consistent results, but at a cost three times lower than that of established methods. We also present a microfluidic fluorescence assay, which exploits a synergistic combination of microfluidic technology and fluorescence microscopy, to realize cost-effective and multiplexed measurement of kinetics of aptamer-target analyte binding without requiring special-purpose equipment.

• Mechanical engineering
• Drug monitoring
• Oligonucleotides
• Protein binding
• Monoclonal antibodies--Therapeutic use
• Nucleotides

This item is currently under embargo. It will be available starting 2026-04-09.

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