Limitation of the study are those barriers or challenges that you encountered while writing your undergraduate or postgraduate project/thesis.

In the course of carrying out your study certain circumstances or challenges could cause a delay or negatively affect you (the researcher) and slow down the process of executing the study. For example, a lot of students were faced with the problem of accessing their respondents to either administer questionnaires, interview or collect relevant data due to social distancing as a result of the COVID 19 pandemic which shook the whole world. The outcome was series of delayed or cancelled appointments.

You are expected to mention all the problems or limitation that affected you or the process of researching from the first day of study till the last day of completion.

There are other challenges which affects research either directly or indirectly. Hence, you have to mention these challenges in this section and at the same time show how you were able to tackle the challenges.

This section of your project is very necessary because it is believed that every research project comes with its challenges, hence nobody is expecting the journey to be seamless. It is also a way of ascertaining that you did your project yourself and was able to tackle the challenges all by yourself.

Example of limitation of the study in research

The example below gives you an insight on how to arrange the limitations you encountered while carrying out a research and the measures you took to curtail the problems that arose.

LIMITATION OF THE STUDY FORMAT IN RESEARCH

The study was limited by the following;

Accessibility: Gaining access to property owners was a difficult task for the researcher. It took several visits to some property owners before audience was granted.

Non-Co-operative Attitude: The researcher did not get one hundred percent cooperation from residents in New Haven and key staff of Enugu State Town Planning Authority at first, reasons being that the residents were being careful on information divulged while staff of Town Planning Authority reluctantly referred the researcher to their superiors who appeared very busy at a time. The researcher had to do a formal writing to the Authority before audience was granted.

Time: Time was a major limitation for the researcher. Combining academic work with research work was not easy. Resilience and hard work led to the completion of the study.

Materials: The researcher was faced with the problem of getting sufficient up-to-date research materials for review. Insistent and continuous surfing of the internet and queries in several academic libraries helped in actualizing the study.

Additional Example of limitation of the study

Enugu having served as the regional and new state capital over the years has enjoyed a lot of administrative attention.  It was once selected as one of the three pilot cities in Nigeria for the sustainable cities program.  Regrettably, the federal government workers in Enugu have not been able to access the National housing fund scheme, through the federal mortgage bank due to a lack of awareness from the management of the different federal ministries in Enugu and the federal mortgage bank. For this reason, there are no specific case studies on the performance of the National Housing Fund Scheme in Enugu Urban.  Discussions of research on the subject matter were, therefore, mostly generalized from other areas.

During the research and data collection, part of the problems encountered is the lack of exposure of the federal government workers to the assessment of the National Housing Fund Scheme which resulted in difficulty in giving out accurate information thus making it necessary to undertake several visits to the study areas.  The data for this study also required a lengthy and costly survey which requires a lot of time and skilled assistance and this was not easy to come by.