If you are working on a thesis, dissertation, or other formal research project, chances are your advisor or committee will ask you to address the delimitations of your study. When faced with this request, many students respond with a puzzled look and then go on to address what are actually the study's limitations.
If you're wondering what the difference between these two terms is, don't worry—you're not alone!
In a previous article , we covered what goes into the limitations, delimitations, and assumptions sections of your thesis or dissertation. Here, we will dive a bit deeper into the differences between limitations and delimitations and provide some helpful tips for addressing them in your research project—whether you are working on a quantitative or qualitative study.
These concepts are easy to get confused because both limitations and delimitations restrict (or limit) the questions you'll be able to answer with your study, most notably in terms of generalizability.
However, the biggest difference between limitations and delimitations is the degree of control you have over them—that is, how much they are based in conscious, intentional choices you made in designing your study.
Limitations occur in all types of research and are, for the most part, outside the researcher's control (given practical constraints, such as time, funding, and access to populations of interest). They are threats to the study's internal or external validity.
Limitations may include things such as participant drop-out, a sample that isn't entirely representative of the desired population, violations to the assumptions of parametric analysis (e.g., normality, homogeneity of variance), the limits of self-report, or the absence of reliability and validity data for some of your survey measures.
Some limitations are inherent to your research design itself. For example, you won't be able to infer causality from a correlational study or generalize to an entire population from a case study. Likewise, while an experimental study allows you to draw causal conclusions, it may require a level of experimental control that looks very different from the real world (thus lowering external validity). Of course, your choice of research design is within your control; however, the limitations of the design refer to those aspects that may restrict your ability to answer the questions you might like to answer.
Limitations can get in the way of your being able to answer certain questions or draw certain types of inferences from your findings. Therefore, it's important to acknowledge them upfront and make note of how they restrict the conclusions you'll be able to draw from your study. Frequently, limitations can get in the way of our ability to generalize our findings to the larger populations or to draw causal conclusions, so be sure to consider these issues when you're thinking about the potential limitations of your study.
Delimitations are also factors that can restrict the questions you can answer or the inferences you can draw from your findings. However, they are based on intentional choices you make a priori (i.e., as you're designing the study) about where you're going to draw the boundaries of your project. In other words, they define the project's scope.
Like limitations, delimitations are a part of every research project, and this is not a bad thing. In fact, it's very important! You can't study everything at once. If you try to do so, your project is bound to get huge and unwieldy, and it will become a lot more difficult to interpret your results or come to meaningful conclusions with so many moving parts. You have to draw the line somewhere, and the delimitations are where you choose to draw these lines.
One of the clearest examples of a delimitation that applies to almost every research project is participant exclusion criteria. In conducting either a quantitative or a qualitative study, you will have to define your population of interest. Defining this population of interest means that you will need to articulate the boundaries of that population (i.e., who is not included). Those boundaries are delimitations.
For example, if you're interested in understanding the experiences of elementary school teachers who have been implementing a new curriculum into their classrooms, you probably won't be interviewing or sending a survey to any of the following people: non-teachers, high-school teachers, college professors, principals, parents of elementary school children, or the children themselves. Furthermore, you probably won't be talking to elementary school teachers who have not yet had the experience of implementing the curriculum in question. You would probably only choose to gather data from elementary school teachers who have had this experience because that is who you're interested in for the purposes of your study. Perhaps you'll narrow your focus even more to elementary school teachers in a particular school district who have been teaching for a particular length of time. The possibilities can go on. These are choices you will need to make, both for practical reasons (i.e., the population you have access to) and for the questions you are trying to answer.
Understanding Abbreviations: e.g. or i.e.


The mother glider is quite large now. The baby is visible through the pouch as the skin is stretched fairly thin and is semitransparent. On occasion you may see a tail or foot slip through the pouch opening. Many breeders lower the sleeping area to prevent possible injuries to a newly out of pouch joey.
Twins in pouch approximately 4.5 weeks.
Twins in pouch approximately 6 weeks. They are still very shiny and are just starting to show a hint of color on the ears.
Twins in pouch approximately 6.5 weeks. Notice that the joeys are still shiny, but are starting to get color on their dorsal stripe.
This is a short video of a female caramel sugar glider with a joey tail and foot peeking out of pouch. Joeys are approximately 6.5 to 7 weeks in pouch. Notice the tail is shiny, but has color.


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Using International Human Rights Law to Guarantee the Right to Health: a Brazilian Experience
Posted on December 13, 2016 by sekyerek
by Iago Morais de Oliveira*
In 2014, fourteen families searched for assistance from the Public Prosecution of the State of Paraíba to guarantee the right to an effective medical treatment for their relatives—sixteen patients who suffered from several neurological conditions which caused multiple seizures a day (sometimes 20 in one single afternoon).
All conventional treatments proved unsuccessful. There was hope that products based on cannabidiol (CBD) would considerably lessen the number of daily seizures (and, even, put an end to it), allowing patients and their families to have a better quality life.
CBD is of the many active substances identified in cannabis sativa. Even though it causes no addiction, since it doesn't contain any of the psychoactive components of marijuana, such as THC, the Brazilian Health Surveillance Agency has kept the substance on the list of proscribed chemical components for many years.
Considering this, what could be done when the State, the one responsible for guaranteeing the access to health, fails to provide it?
The Dialogue between International Human Rights Law and Brazilian Law
Until 2008 it had been assumed by the Supreme Court that human rights treaties, once incorporated, would have the same legal status of a federal ordinary law. But since then the Court has changed opinion on this subject.
For the record, back in 2004, Congress passed the amendment to Constitution n. 45, which, among other provisions, held that "[i]nternational human rights treaties and conventions which are approved in each House of the National Congress, in two rounds of voting, by three fifths of the votes of the representative members shall be equivalent to constitutional amendments." International human rights treaties, then, would not always share the same position as federal ordinary laws.
When the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that there would be no more civil imprisonment for indebtedness in the case of an unfaithful trustee, it placed human rights treaties that were not approved under the legislative process of constitutional amendments one level above federal ordinary laws. In other words, within a hierarchical scale such treaties would be below the Constitution, but above any other domestic legal disposition. This is the case of the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights.
Consequently, all laws and other normative acts are only valid after submitted to (and approved in) both constitutionality and conventionality control.
The Doctrine of the Conventionality Control in Use
The doctrine started to be delineated under the scope of the Inter-American Human Rights System with the case Almonacid Arellano y otros vs. Chile (2006), in which the Inter-American Court argued that national judges, as part of the State, are bound by the conventions the State has ratified, and therefore must verify if the domestic legal order is compatible with the provisions of the American Convention by exercising a sort of conventionality control. The Court established "to perform this task, the Judiciary has to take into account not only the treaty, but also the interpretation thereof made by the Inter-American Court, which is the ultimate interpreter of the American Convention."
In 2012, a group of Law students gathered and led by Professor Flavianne Nóbrega (at that time professor of Universidade Federal da Paraíba), decided to put academic knowledge into practise. One of its goals was to assist the Public Prosecution and the Public Defence in assessing the Inter-American System treaties and jurisprudence, so as to identity how human rights standards could be used to uphold legal actions concerning human rights violations.
Named "Access to the Jurisdiction of the Inter-American Human Rights System," the group is registered at the National Council of Technological and Scientific Development and has been contributing to the aforementioned institutions with international legal aid, being mostly focused on cases that involve violations of the right to health and the rights of indigenous people and other traditional communities to the land.
In 2014, with regards to the situation previously described involving those sixteen patients, the Public Prosecution of the State of Paraíba requested a legal opinion on the extent of Brazil's duties to protect, respect and fulfil human rights under the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, emphasizing the right to health.
The group searched for all human rights documents relating to this subject, some even beyond the inter-American scope. The main sources included the American Convention on Human Rights the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Based on meticulous research, in July of 2014 the group wrote a legal report highlighting the reasons why Brazil should allow the import of cannabidiol-based products for medical use, grounded on the idea of the conventionality control. The main arguments emphasized that, according to the current status of incorporated human rights law in relation to the federal ordinary laws and other normative acts, the prohibition of the National Health Surveillance Agency regarding cannabidiol represented a violation of the human right to health, since it prevented the access to the most reliable treatment available.
The Public Prosecution filed a class action using the full content of the legal opinion written by the group and obtained in 2015 an injunction against the State, which allowed the patients to import the products. In the same year the National Health Surveillance Agency removed the cannabidiol from the list of banned substances, thus authorizing its prescription for patients whose medical conditions demand the use of cannabidiol-based products. The judgment on the merits was rendered three months later.
Little Davi, aged 5, awaiting his mother to prepare the cannabidiol-based medicine.
Source: http://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/anvisa-divulga-orientacao-sobre-como-importar-remedio-feito-partir-de-substancia-da-maconha-12460663
The implementation of the right to health poses everyday challenges. Some Brazilian families still struggle to get access to effective medical treatment concerning CBD. However, the decision represented a big step towards protecting human dignity. Furthermore, it shows that when a group of dedicated students decide to talk about human rights and do something about it, good things happen…in Paraíba or in London!
*Iago Morais de Oliveira is an undergraduate Law student at the Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil. His main research interests include International Criminal Justice and International Human Rights Law, especially within the scope of the Inter-American System of Human Rights.
This entry was posted in Child rights, Law, Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.
One Response to Using International Human Rights Law to Guarantee the Right to Health: a Brazilian Experience
Lawyer Tolga Ersoy says:
A very informative article on a very important issue. Thanks.
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