Limitations
Chapter 14 in Thesis – On the Universal Meaning and Significance of Spirituality –
In the process of writing this thesis many limitations revealed themselves. I will be covering what I take to be the three greatest limitations in this section.
Personal Limitations
The first potential personal limitation I will mention is personal bias. I, the author, has personally had my life changed by various spiritual practices, creating a bias to believe that spirituality should be considered a vital dimension of life. Moreover, I have had the experiences of a successful integrations of various spiritual practices from different traditions in my personal life, creating a bias to believe that there is a universal reality underlying spirituality. Although I have done my best take an objective approach and ground myself in objective evidence, my personal experience has undoubtedly steered by thinking in the process of writing this thesis, and this should be considered by the reader. However, the reader should of course also consider the evidence and the arguments on their own merits.
It is no secret that the topic of this thesis is great and difficult, and neither should it be a secret that I am by no means qualified to take on a project at this level of difficulty. This thesis is my first major scholarly work, and it has been written it in the context of a Bachelor’s thesis for my Psychology degree as part of an Honors program, and the reader should of course take this into account, that is, that I am not a scientist nor a scholar, I am a Bachelors student in Psychology. Moreover, neither my mentor nor myself is an academic expert on spirituality. In writing this thesis, I have therefore had limited experience with the topic. My mentor Dr. Orly Idan who is a Psycholinguist with great expertise in academic writing and has been an immense support for the process of academic writing as well as for giving feedback on the content, for which I am highly grateful. However, it should be clear that there is only so much a mentor can do, and in the end the quality of a paper fundamentally relies on the author. As helpful as Dr. Idan has been, she has been guiding me through my very first major academic project, and my own lacking experience is therefore a significant limitation of this thesis.
It should also be noted that the material of this thesis has required research into fields which extend well beyond the material included in my degree, such as Anthropology, Philosophy and even some Physics. I have therefore had to explore these fields as a beginner to write this thesis, and this should therefore also be considered a limitation. I was well aware of these limitations before embarking on this thesis and embarked on it knowingly. I did so because this was the topic and these were the questions that I burned for more than anything else, and I reasoned that writing this thesis would be a unique opportunity to explore them. In other words, I embarked on this thesis primarily in the spirit of learning as much as possible from the process.
Beyond lacking experience I also had limited time. I researched the topic over the course of my third year of BA studies, but I only started writing after the end of courses. During this time, I devoted three months of full time writing and completed it during the fourth month while working full time. Given my lacking experience, this time constraint has put limitations on the rigorousness and general quality of the thesis.
It is however important to mention that I have devoted my utmost to making the most of the time and experience I had available to create the best possible work. I should also say that although I do not have formal education in spirituality or some of the academic fields I have touched, I have spent around 5-6 years exploring these topics and studying them informally as a passion. This experience has come through in the writing of this thesis, contributing significantly to the quality of the work.
Lacking Detail Orientation
In this thesis I have explored highly abstract questions and covered a lot of ground in the context of these questions. As a result, I have not been able to go into any significant level of detail in my review of the literature. Some of these missing details may have had important implications for the conclusion I have drawn, and this is therefore a natural limitation of this thesis. In writing this thesis, I have tried to correct for this limitation by drawing on the insights and conclusions of handbooks and reviews who have been in touch with the details. In this way, all the conclusions of this thesis have been in indirect touch with the details. However, the thesis will surely have been stronger had it been in more direct touch with these details. As an example, it would have strengthened the thesis to consider the definition of spirituality in the context of specific traditions and practices. In other words, it would have been useful to have included some case analyses in the contexts of the ideas of this thesis. It should however be emphasized that it may not have been wise to go into much detail considering the scope and time constraints of the project. Nevertheless, it is important to mention these limitations to help interpret the work for the readers and to help guide the work that needs to be done on these ideas in the future.
Lacking Empirical and Theoretical Validation
This thesis has been philosophical in nature. This means that the conclusions of this thesis have not been tested empirically and that their ideas of this thesis go beyond what may be found in the reviewed literature. The philosophical nature of this thesis means that the conclusions of this paper have not only been oriented towards connecting the dots between the existing ideas which have been reviewed by the literature as is characteristic of a theoretical paper, it has also been a process of reasoning and conjecture on the basis of that literature. In other words, while the reasoning and therefore the conclusions of this thesis are based on evidence and theory, they have gone beyond what can be found in the reviewed literature. This means that there may be novel ideas in the conclusions of this thesis which have not yet been sufficiently empirically nor theoretically validated. This is of course what it means to explore new ideas as a part of a philosophical process. The validation sometimes comes after the ideas. This limitation is therefore a characteristic of the philosophical paper I would therefore not have done any differently should I have done it again. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that the conclusions of this thesis may be fresh and are in need of further empirical and theoretical validation.
Review
Overall, the primary limitations of this thesis are in part a consequence of time constraints, lacking academic experience, and personal bias of the author, and in part a consequence of the philosophical and highly abstract nature of the paper. These limitations should inform the consideration of the general reader as well as those who may be inspired to contribute to the development of the ideas of this thesis such as promoting the reconciliation of spiritual knowledge. I will now proceed to give my general recommendations for such future work.
Author – Sagi Andersen