Designing a Cross-Sectional Study

The fastest, most affordable window into a population's health. This level teaches you to design a clean cross-sectional study, the workhorse of prevalence surveys and burden estimates, and to avoid the biases that quietly distort them.

Who this level is for

Researchers, clinicians, coordinators and program staff who need to measure how common something is, or explore associations at a single point in time. Recommended after Level 1.

What you'll learn

• What cross-sectional studies are and what they do best: prevalence, burden and hypothesis generation
• The step-by-step of designing one, from population to measurement
• How to judge whether your sample truly represents the population (building on the sampling skills from Foundations)
• The biases that threaten these studies, selection, non-response, information and social-desirability bias
• The honest strengths and limits of the design

You finish with: A cross-sectional version of your protocol.