Limitations and Delimitations.pptx

Research Limitations and De Limitations

1. Limitations and Delimitations Dr Amita Gupta

2. 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.

3. Research Limitations 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 .

4. Research Limitations

5. Common Examples of Limitations

6. In qualitative research, common limitations include the following:

7. Research Delimitations

8. Research Delimitations

9. Research Delimitations

10. Common Examples of Delimitations As noted above, the two most common sources of delimitations in both quantitative and qualitative research include the following: – Inclusion/exclusion criteria (or how you define your population of interest) – Research questions or problems you’ve chosen to examine Several other common sources of delimitations include the following: – Theoretical framework or perspective adopted – Methodological framework or paradigm chosen (e.g., quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods) – In quantitative research, the variables you’ve chosen to measure or manipulate (as opposed to others)

11. Conclusion: Limitations vs Delimitations Whether you’re conducting a quantitative or qualitative study, you will (hopefully!) have chosen your research design because it is well suited to the questions you’re hoping to answer. Because these questions define the boundaries or scope of your project and thus point to its delimitations, your research design itself will also be related to these delimitations.

12. Conclusion: Limitations vs Delimitations

13. Questions to Ask Yourself As you are considering the limitations and delimitations of your project, it can be helpful to ask yourself a few different questions. Questions to help point out your study’s limitations : If I had an unlimited budget, unlimited amounts of time, access to all possible populations, and the ability to manipulate as many variables as I wanted, how would I design my study differently to be better able to answer the questions I want to answer? (The ways in which your study falls short of this will point to its limitations.) Are there design issues that get in the way of my being able to draw causal conclusions? Are there sampling issues that get in the way of my being able to generalize my findings? Are there issues related to the measures I’m using or the methods I’m using to collect data? Do I have concerns about participants telling the truth or being able to provide accurate responses to my questions? Are there any other factors that might limit my study’s internal or external validity?

14. Questions that help point out your study’s delimitations: What are my exclusion criteria? Who did I not include in my study, and why did I make this choice? What questions did I choose not to address in my study? (Of course, the possibilities are endless here, but consider related questions that you chose not to address.) In what ways did I narrow the scope of my study in order to hone in on a particular issue or question? What other methodologies did I not use that might have allowed me to answer slightly different questions about the same topic?

15. How to Write About Limitations and Delimitations

16. How to Write About Limitations and Delimitations

17. Thank you