Q.Describe the limitations of psychological enquiry.

Psychological enquiry faces three general limitations beyond the strengths and weaknesses of any single method. …

Psychological enquiry, taken as a whole, faces three broader limitations beyond the specific strengths and weaknesses already associated with individual methods.

The first limitation is the lack of a true zero point. Unlike physical measurement, which genuinely starts from zero, psychological measurement has no true zero (no person has zero intelligence), so psychologists must fix an arbitrary starting point. As a result, psychological scores are never absolute; they only have relative value, which is why rank-based scores can be misleading, since equal differences in rank (1st, 2nd, 3rd) do not necessarily correspond to equal differences in the underlying ability.

The second limitation is the relative nature of psychological tools. A test is built around the features of the specific context it was developed for, so a test designed for urban students may unfairly disadvantage children from a different context, such as a tribal area, and a test built in a Western country may not translate well to the Indian context; such tests need to be carefully adapted before being used elsewhere. …