![]() ![]() Advantages and disadvantages of longitudinal studies ![]() In a prospective study, you might follow a group of both smokers and non-smokers over time to see if they develop cancer later on. Retrospective vs prospective exampleIn a retrospective study, you might look at past medical records of patients to see whether those who developed this cancer had previously smoked. Retrospective studies are generally less expensive and take less time than prospective studies, but are more prone to measurement error. In a prospective study, you choose a group of subjects and follow them over time, collecting data in real time.In a retrospective study, you collect data on events that have already happened.You can choose to conduct a retrospective or a prospective study. If you choose to collect your own data, the way you go about it will be determined by the type of longitudinal study you choose to perform. If you choose to go this route, you should carefully examine the source of the dataset as well as what data is available to you. You will also be restricted to whichever variables the original researchers decided to investigate. To preserve the anonymity of the participants, the data collected is often aggregated so that it can only be analyzed on a regional level. However, they are more restrictive than data you collect yourself. These statistics are generally very trustworthy and allow you to investigate changes over a long period of time. For example, anyone can access data from the 1970 British Cohort Study, which has followed the lives of 17,000 Brits since their births in a single week in 1970, through the UK Data Service website. Many governments or research centers carry out longitudinal studies and make the data freely available to the general public. If you want to implement a longitudinal study, you have two choices: collecting your own data or using data already gathered by somebody else. Without the cross-sectional study first, you would not have known to focus on men in particular. You then decide to design a longitudinal study to further examine this relationship in men. You first conduct a cross-sectional study to see if there is a link between smoking and stomach cancer, and you discover that a link exists in men but not in women. Cross-sectional vs longitudinal exampleYou want to study the relationship between smoking and stomach cancer. Because cross-sectional studies are shorter and therefore cheaper to carry out, they can be used to discover correlations that can then be investigated in a longitudinal study. They can be used to provide a snapshot of a group or society at a specific moment.īoth types of study can prove useful in research. The opposite of a longitudinal study is a cross-sectional study. While longitudinal studies repeatedly observe the same participants over a period of time, cross-sectional studies examine different samples (or a “cross-section”) of the population at one point in time. See editing example Longitudinal vs cross-sectional studies
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