Cross Sectional Study Design Examples

Descriptive cross sectional studies the persistence and reach of a studied factor.

Cross sectional study design examples. Cross sectional studies allow you to collect data from a large pool of subjects and compare differences between groups. For example a the control arm of a randomised trial may also be used as a cohort study. Cross sectional designs are used to examine how people change over time by using representatives from different age categories.

This variation produces aanalytical reports that deal with the statistical relationship between two variables. Cross sectional study example 2. Cross sectional studies capture a specific moment in time.

National censuses for instance provide a snapshot of conditions in that country at that time. The recent study by ha and colleagues 2007 provides an excellent example of a cross sectional investigation. And the baseline measures of a cohort study may be used as a cross sectional study.

Spotting the study design the type of study can generally be worked at by looking at three issues as per the tree of design in figure 1. An example of this is surveying the epidemiology of a disease in a rural area. Despite these epistemological and analytical shortcomings cross sectional studies provide an expedient means to generate hypotheses which can be subsequently tested in studies of other design.

Example of cross sectional study design for example if there is a simple cross sectional design in which an epidemiologist would be trying to find out if there is a link between the grades of students and television watching as she infers that the students who spend most of their time watching too much television do not get sufficient time to do their homework and perform poorly at school too. In practice cross sectional studies will include an element of both types of design. For example a cross sectional study might be used to determine if exposure to specific risk factors might correlate with particular outcomes.

We could for example look at age gender income and educational level in relation to walking and cholesterol levels with little or no additional cost. Applications of cross sectional studies cross sectional studies are relatively easy and inexpensive to conduct and are useful for investigating exposures that are fixed characteristics of individuals such as ethnicity or blood group. A researcher might collect cross sectional data on past smoking habits and current diagnoses of lung cancer for example.