Which of the following is a false statement regarding longitudinal studies: September 2011
Ans. C: Less time consuming Longitudinal studies are difficult to organize and more time consuming Longitudinal study It is a correlational research study that involves repeated observations of the same variables over long periods of time -- often many decades. It is a type of observational study. Longitudinal studies are often used in psychology to study developmental trends across the life span, and in sociology to study life events throughout lifetimes or generations. The reason for this is that unlike cross-sectional studies, longitudinal studies track the same people, and therefore the differences observed in those people are less likely to be the result of cultural differences across generations. Because of this benefit, longitudinal studies make observing changes more accurate and they are applied in various other fields. The design is used to uncover predictors of ceain diseases. Because most longitudinal studies are observational, in the sense that they observe the state of the world without manipulating it, it has been argued that they may have less power to detect causal relationships than do experiments. But because of the repeated observation at the individual level, they have more power than cross-sectional observational studies, by viue of being able to exclude time-invariant unobserved individual differences, and by viue of observing the temporal order of events. Types of longitudinal studies include coho studies and panel studies. Coho studies sample a coho, defined as a group experiencing some event (typically bih) in a selected time period and studying them at intervals through time. Panel studies sample a cross-section, and survey it at (usually regular) intervals. A retrospective study is a longitudinal study that looks back in time. For instance a researcher may look up the medical records of previous years to look for a trend.
Studies natural history of disease
Helps in identifying risk factors
Less time consuming
Incidence rate can be calculated