Whether you’re writing your dissertation or proposal, you’ll need to specify the Delimitations and Limitations of your research. Here is a description of the differences between them.
DELIMITATIONS are what you decide upfront will be the boundaries, restrictions or fences of your research.
For example, you may decide to restrict your population or sample, or to restrict the time period of your study, its geographic location, the theories you’re modelling, or some other boundary.
In effect, you purposefully ringfence the scope of your research to make it feasible, or more manageable.
LIMITATIONS, however, are weaknesses in your research that you need to acknowledge. These are not boundaries that you set upfront, and are not directly under your control.
For example, in your proposal, you might say that your research design is limited as it does not involve experimental manipulation, or your results are not generalisable as you’ve used the qualitative research approach, or nonprobability sampling.
Later, when you’re writing the dissertation, you may have to add further limitations. For example, your research results may be limited because the scores of your questionnaire turned out to be less than reliable (let’s hope not!), or because you failed to recruit a large enough sample size for adequate statistical power (let’s really hope not!).
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