Cross Sectional Studies: The cross sectional studies are simpler and target at discovering the phenomenon, concern, attitude by looking at snap shot view of the cross section of the population. This helps to obtain a more holistic picture which holds relevance with the time in which the study was conducted. To give an example, the use of a cross sectional design would be to have a look at the demographic characteristics of the population. The advantage of these kinds of studies are that they mostly undertake only one contact with the population under study and the cost involved in undertaking the study is relatively cheaper.
Some studies do pre-test and post-test work towards measuring the change in the situation or the phenomenon that is the focus of the study. These kinds of studies mostly measure the effectiveness of a programme. These kinds of studies are usually a variation from the conventional cross sectional studies as they take into consideration two sets of data collection which is cross sectional on both sides. The purpose is to determine if any change has occurred.
Retrospective Studies: Another kind of study is the retrospective study. The name itself is self-explanatory and as obvious it is used to study a specific phenomenon which has had an occurrence in the past. The probable approach adopted in these studies is the use of secondary data collection which reveals information and data on the previous studies and databases.
Prospective studies: In contrast to retrospective studies, the prospective study design targets to estimate the probability of the occurrence of an event in the coming future. They help to guess what would be the outcome of any event. Usually the general science experiments are of a prospective nature as the experimenter can only know the effect or impact of an experiment only after it has run its course.
Longitudinal Studies: This kind of studies stretch over a longer time period where data is to be collected repeatedly throughout the course of the study. The time span of the longitudinal studies could be from few months to several decades. These kinds of studies help to identify the correlation between the variables and mostly are not able to give out a causal relationship
I opted for the cross sectional design. It suited the best to my research and it was really interesting and made research more clear and understandable to the guide.
I did not have so deep knowledge about the research design and their types after reading this blog I’ll be able to choose an appropriate type and the explanation would become much better and convincing.