Delimitation and Limitation:

There may  be many  aspects of the problem that need  to be  explored, but  it  is difficult to  cover all aspects in  a single research study because of Limited  time, finance, facilities and other  reasons. Delimitations indicate the  cut off points beyond which the researcher does not  intend  to probe. 'It includes  those restrictions that the researcher placed  on  the  study prior to  gathering data. Refer to  the example of pre-operative teaching of breathing exercises where only adult of 20 to  55 years of age participated in the study. This means that  any patient with less  than 20  or more than  55 years was not included  in  the sample. Hence, one of the delimitations was  age i.e.  "the  study was  limited  to  adult patients between  the  age of 20  to 55 years. "Delimitations are considered at every decision point during planning stage of  the study.  

The  limitations  indicate the weaknesses of  the entire study, as the  researcher perceives them. The reader  looks for  the  shortcomings for two  reasons; one, to identify whether the researcher has recognized the  flaws; second to  know  the difficulties the  researcher has faced which  are valuable for  future researcher. Some of  the common examples of  limitations are "the  reliability; the instrument developed was not  satisfactory; "subject--mortality", i.e.  some of the  sample subjects who took  the pretest were not available for post-test, "content of  the data  indicate subjective bias". 

Therefore the  delimitations are set during the planning stage whereas the limitations are experienced during implementation stage and these uncontrollable elements are reported  in  the third stage of research process  i.e. while writing.