Cross-Sectional

Designs
Type of Research Design
 What is Research design?
● It is the overall structure of the research.

● It focuses on what type of study is planned and what kind

of results are expected from the research.

● It is based on the research question or problem.

 The first decision a researcher
must make is whether to test a
group of people at a single

Cross-Sectional moment in time or whether to

test a group of people several

Designs times, across many days, weeks

or even years.

If you're ever interested in If the researcher decide that he is

studying the differences as a child going to study a group of people
develops and matures, then you just one time, in a single session,
have two options: a longitudinal that research design is called
study and a cross-sectional study. cross-sectional research.
Example 1: How quickly do speech and verbal skills develop?
For a researcher to study this, we would need to take a cross-sectional sample of a group of young kids.
Specifically, we need to look at a large group of kids, their specific ages, and a series of tests dealing with speech
and verbal skills.

Why do we need a large group? We as researchers need to control for individual differences. Some children will
speak at a very young age, while others are delayed. Having a large group helps us control for some of the
variability.

Why do we need specific ages? If we are dealing with any type of group, we need to clearly define them. We want
each group to be exclusive, so that there isn't any overlap. In this experiment, we could differentiate age by
months or even number of days. However, if we were to differentiate ages by something as broad as years, then
we would have fewer groups. Remember, the focus of this experiment is on speech and verbal skill development,
so we need to focus on talking as it develops instead of after it has reached a plateau.

Our tests would need to be clearly defined to ensure that we are actually measuring what we're attempting to
measure. But, the specifics are not important in this lesson. In our study, we will divide a large group of children
and then study their speech and verbal skills. By examining the growth in ability as compared to the age, we can
begin to say something specific about skill and age.
Example 2
What if instead of looking at the development of a person over time, we focused on the development and growth of
something else? We will take a group of individuals with cancer at various stages and in various stages of
treatment and measure them for overall psychological well-being. What that means would be up to the individual
researcher, and they would need to define it before starting on their project, but that is a little more than we need
to go into here.

Cancer is typically divided into four stages, and we can define someone as pre-treatment or by what round of
treatment they're in. We're only interested in those who currently have a cancerous growth and are in treatment, so
those in remission will not be part of the study.

● Group 1: Pretreatment Stage I

● Group 2: Pretreatment Stage II
● Group 3: Pretreatment Stage III
● Group 4: Pretreatment Stage IV
● Group 5: First round of treatment Stage I

And so on and so forth. We could have upwards of 20 or 30 groups, depending on how many rounds of treatment
we wanted to consider. We could also reduce it down and only examine the stage of cancer and have four groups.
Cross-sectional designs can focus on taking samples from any place in which development occurs. All that is
 A cross-sectional study design is defined

Defination
as an observational research type that
analyzes data of variables collected at one
given point of time across a sample
population or a pre-defined subset.

This study type is also known as cross-

sectional analysis, transverse study or
prevalence study.

The data collected in a cross-sectional

study is from people who are similar in all
variables except the one variable which is
under study, such as age, income levels,
or geographic location
This variable remains constant throughout
the cross-sectional study.
This is unlike a longitudinal study, where
variables in the study can change over the
course of research.
Introduction:
● Cross-sectional studies are often used in developmental psychology, but this method is also
utilized in many other areas including social science and education.
For example, researchers studying developmental psychology might select groups of people who
are different ages, but investigate them at one point in time. By doing this, any differences
between the age groups can presumably be attributed to age differences rather than something
that happened over time.
● Cross-sectional studies are observational in nature and are known as descriptive research,
not causal or relational, meaning that you can't use them to determine the cause of
something, such as a disease. Researchers record the information that is present in a
population, but they do not manipulate variables.
This type of research can be used to describe characteristics that exist in a community, but not to
determine cause-and-effect relationships between different variables. This method is often used to
make inferences about possible relationships or to gather preliminary data to support further
research and experimentation.
This is a quasi-experiment, defined as not a true experiment, because it uses naturally formed
groups rather than randomly assigned ones.
A true experiment must have randomly assigned groups so that everyone has an equal chance
of being in the experimental or the control group.
Why is a cross-sectional experiment not a true experiment? Simply put, you cannot assign
people to age categories. You as a researcher cannot assign your participants to be three years
old, five years old, and eight years old. Life and time don't work that way.

Cross-sectional designs are used to examine how people change over time by using
representatives from different age categories.
This allows you to do an experiment and look to see the differences between a five-year-old, a
10-year-old, and a 15-year-old all in one experimental run instead of working over 10 years to
complete this one experiment. This is one of the advantages offered by a cross-sectional design;
you don't have to worry about losing your entire sample group as time passes or what might
happen over the years because your entire experiment is completed in one test run.
Defining variables of Cross-Sectional Studies
Some of the key variables of a cross-sectional study are:

● The cross-sectional study is conducted with the same set of variables over a certain period
of time. The study is conducted in a single instance, unlike longitudinal studies, where
variables can change over the period of extensive research.
● Cross-sectional studies give the flexibility to the researcher to look at multiple variables
together as a constant, with only one variable being the focus of the cross-sectional study.

The easiest way to encapsulate a cross-sectional study is that it is a snapshot of a group of people
at that point in time. They are used to determine what is happening in real time, at the moment.
Hence, this research type is used to draw the pulse of the population data at any given point in
time.
Types of Cross-Sectional studies:
● Descriptive

A cross-sectional study may be entirely descriptive and it used to assess the frequency and
distribution of the study topic in a certain demographic. For example, how a random sample of
Universities across a state is assessed to check for obesity amongst women.

● Analytical

This type of cross-sectional study is used to investigate the association between two related or
unrelated parameters. This methodology isn’t entirely full proof though because the presence of
risk factors and outcomes are simultaneous and their studies are simultaneous too. For example,
to validate if coal workers in the mine could develop bronchitis only looks at the factors in the
mine. What it doesn’t account for is that bronchitis could be inherent or may have existed from
before.
 Some of the key characteristics
of a cross-sectional study
The Defining include:

Characteristics of Cross-
● The study takes place at a single
point in time

Sectional Studies
● It does not involve manipulating
variables
● It allows researchers to look at
numerous characteristics at once
(age, income, gender, etc.)
● It's often used to look at the
prevailing characteristics in a given
population
● It can provide information about
what is happening in a current
population
Cross-Setional Studies are Conducted accoss multiple
industries like:
● Retail – In retail, a cross-sectional study can be conducted on males and females between
the ages 24-35 to check for spending or purchase trend differences between the sexes.
● Business – In business, a cross-sectional study can be conducted to understand how
people of different socio-economic status from one geographical segment respond to one
change in an offering.
● Healthcare – A cross-sectional study in healthcare is used to understand how prone kids
between the age of 2-12 across different boroughs in the US are prone to a low calcium
deficiency.
● Education – A cross-sectional study in education is particularly helpful to understand how
either males or females from a similar age bracket but different ethnicities react to their
grasp of a certain object.
 Advantages of Cross-Sectional Studies
Some of the advantages of cross-sectional studies include:

● They're inexpensive and fast. Cross-sectional studies are usually relatively inexpensive in that it usually
does not take a long time to complete, it takes place over a relatively short span of time so it is easier for
participants to cooperate, it has a low dropout rate since it does take place over shorter period of time.
● The subjects can be picked to be more representative of the population. This allows you to maintain high
ecological validity, because your study looks a lot like the population you're interested in studying.
● They allow different variables. Researchers can collect data on some different variables to see how
differences in sex, age, educational status, and income might correlate with the critical variable of interest.
● They pave the way for further study. While cross-sectional studies cannot be used to determine causal
relationships, they can provide a useful springboard to further research. When looking at a public health
issue, such as whether a particular behavior might be linked to a particular illness, researchers might utilize a
cross-sectional study to look for clues that will serve as a useful tool to guide further experimental studies.
Challenges of Cross-Sectional Studies
Some of the potential challenges of cross-sectional studies include:
● Does not differentiate cause and effect: There are other variables that can affect the relationship
between the inferred cause and outcomes.
● Cohort differences: Groups can be affected by cohort differences that arise from the particular
experiences of a unique group of people. Individuals born during the same period may share important
historical experiences, but people in that group who are born in a given geographic region may share
experiences limited solely to their physical location. Individuals who were alive during the invasion of
Pearl Harbor, Vietnam, or 9/11 might have shared experiences that make them different from other age
groups, for example.
● Report biases: Surveys or questionnaires about certain aspects of people's lives may not always result
in accurate reporting.
● It makes comparisons of groups difficult since all the data are collected at one point in time, it
provides little idea as to the direction of change that a group might take (there are no previous data as in
a longitudinal study), it examines people of the same chronological age who may be of different
maturational levels, and reveals nothing about the continuity of development on an individual basis. The
most serious disadvantage is the lack of comparability of groups, because the only thing they differ on is
age.
Analysis of Cross-Sectional Studies:
In a cross-sectional study, to calculate prevalence, multiple parameters are
measured simultaneously – questions, observations, and answers.

Prevalence = No of cases at a given time / No of people at the same given

time

For continuous variables, they fall along a continuum within a given range. To
calculate prevalence, the values have to be below or above a predetermined level
or else median levels may be calculated.
Cross-Sectional vs. Longitudinal Studies
Even though they are both quantitative research methods, there are a few differences between cross-
sectional studies vs longitudinal studies.

In cross-section,mkal studies, the variables are collected at a certain given point of time but longitudinal
studies span across multiple sessions and the variables could change.

Cross-sectional studies are preferred to find common points between variables but longitudinal studies, due to
their nature are then used to dissect the research from the cross-sectional study even further.

The other factor is that due to the longevity of the research, there could be attrition in the longitudinal study
which skews the results finding and the corresponding research whereas, in cross-sectional research, there’s
no chance of that happening because the study is done with the same variables and sometimes at the same
time of collection of variables.