Part of undertaking research is to acknowledge our limiters (our potential biases) and our delimiters (our scoping to make our question answerable).
Whenever we identify a limiter or a delimiter, we then need to DO something about it. We need to manage the risk we have identified. Like risk management, we identify our problem, then either eliminate, substitute, minimise, or isolate the risk.
Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) is one of the best known risk management processes on the planet. Designed to manage food safety risk, I think most of the steps are equally applicable to research risk management.
Below are six of the seven the HACCP principles, as I have adapted them for research projects:
- Conduct a careful risk analysis. Read about potential biases. Understand how each could affect our research project.
- Determine the key biases. Discount the least likely biases. Decide which biases are most likely to be factors in our research project.
- Establish criteria to spot those biases as they occur.
- Create alternative actions to limit, eliminate, substitute or isolate those biases.
- Set verification actions to be sure that each bias is not present, such as cross-questioning, control groups, split data set and cross-tabbing.
- Write up all biases and corrective actions in our methodology.
A limiter is simply a risk. We just need to manage it like a risk.
Sam
read more "Managing research risk with HACCP"
My students often struggle with the difference between assumptions, limitations, and delimitations. So I decided to turn to some business research dictionaries and encyclopaedias in order to get a definition for each of these research aspects.
That was a bonus, as I ran into an excellent resource from Oxford Reference, called "A Dictionary of Business Research Methods". Unfortunately, while this lists almost everything else, it does not contain 'limitations' or 'delimitations' in a business research context (it does have legal definitions).
I gave up on hard copies, encyclopaedias and dictionaries, and went online, reverting to a normal Google search.
The resulting definitions are, for undergraduate business research general methodology purposes:
- Assumptions are things that are accepted as 'true' by other scholars, given, eg, your population, statistical tests, research design, or other delimitations.
- Limiters are potential research weaknesses that are mostly out of your control, impacting the interpretation of your research findings, because of, eg, research design, statistical constraints, access to audiences or data, etc.
- Delimiters are the scope that you set on your research project so it is not too large to complete; eg, why you chose your aims, operationalisation, target populations, etc.
However, when writing or conclusions chapter, limiters and delimiters and assumptions need a little more focus, and that will be grist to the mill for another article.
Sam
References:
read more "What are Assumptions, Limiters and Delimiters? "
