What does it mean?

[Unregistered]

Dear teacher,
could you please answer a question about a doctoral thesis. As I heard, in the conclusion of it there should be mentioned "limitations to the study". What could be possibly meant by these?
Thank you.

[Marylin]

Dear teacher,
could you please answer a question about a doctoral thesis. As I heard, in the conclusion of it there should be mentioned "limitations to the study". What could be possibly meant by these?
Thank you.

Let's say you are doing a study on "rats ability to swim". You might be the very first one to do a study of that kind, therefore your data is limited and the results will be inconclusive because your data is based on your study only. There will be no comparison with other studies, no statistic analysis, etc. to support your theory. Perhaps the data is out there but not enough to make a strong provable statement.

There are other factors that can make your work inconclusive ( because of the limitations) - you were not able to spend enough time observing the rats, and perhaps only some rats can swim while other rats hate water, etc.
All of those aspects will have to be taken into account.

Please, feel free to elaborate on that teachers out here if I missed something. Thanks.