Writing Strategies for Acknowledge Limitations
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Acknowledge Limitations is used to evaluate the study by pointing out the weaknesses of the study specifics and/or tone down their severity. Utilizing this Strategy enables writers to avoid overgeneralization, anticipate potential criticism, and ward off counterclaims. Typically, it is more beneficial for you to identify and acknowledge your own study’s limitations than have them pointed out by a reviewer because the more red flags without explanation that the reviewer sees, the more likely it is that they may reject your work.
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 do not know.
Claiming limitations is a subjective process because you must evaluate the impact of those limitations. Do not solely 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? For this reason, acknowledging them in the Results tends to take place because that is where we see their immediate impact. Here, we leave the more in-depth language use for this strategy for the Discussion section.
