Q&A: In research, what is the difference between implication and recommendation?

Research implications suggest how the findings may be important for policy, practice, theory, and subsequent research. Research implications are basically the conclusions that you draw from your results and explain how the findings may be important for policy, practice, or theory. However, the implications need to be substantiated by evidence and the study's parameters need to be explained and the limitations taken into account to avoid over-generalization of results. 

Recommendations urge specific actions to be taken with regard to policy, practice, theory, or subsequent research. are specific suggestions that you make with regard to further research on the topic. For instance, you can make recommendations on subsequent research that can be conducted, especially, if there is an interest in generalizing the findings beyond the study’s parameters. You may have identified gaps in the literature  that should be addressed, and to which your study may or may not have contributed.

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What is the difference between research implication and recommendation?

 

 

Research implications basically refer to impact that your research might have on future research or policy decision or the relevant field of interest of your study. 'How will your research affect the targeted community or subject field' is the question that implications will answer. Recommendations are based on the results of your research and indicate the specific measures or directions that can be taken. For example, a clinical study might have implications for cancer research and might recommend against the use of a particular hazardous substance. Therefore, implications signify the impact of your research and recommendations might be concrete steps/actions that the research proposes.

Once you have conducted your study and drawn conclusions, you can state the “Research Implications”, which means that you are expressing how your study can affect future prospects in the subject area of your research, the policies or regulations that might be influenced because of your study or you can speculate how the outcomes of your study can have an impact in either hypothesizing a particular topic under consideration or the practical aspects of the same. The research implications are always supported by a strong statistical significance and correlations of results from your research keeping in view the shortcoming of the study. When you make a “Research recommendation”, you can emphatically state what are the next steps that need to be taken to address a problem, what are the immediate actions that need to be implemented to solve a particular question, what needs to be corrected & what needs to be avoided to solve a problem, what is the feasibility of your proposed policy, statements about the nature and timing of an evaluation plan that would be used to determine the effectiveness of the proposed policy. Again, these recommendations should be strongly supported by results of your study.