Strengths and Weaknesses
The strengths and weaknesses of cross-sectional studies are summarised below. Click each heading to find out more.
- Cheap and quick to conduct
- Ethically safe
- Data on all variables is only collected once
- Able to measure prevalence for all factors under investigation
- Multiple outcomes and exposures can be studied
- Good for descriptive analysis and for generating hypotheses
- Difficult to determine whether the outcome followed exposure in time or exposure resulted from the outcome
- Not suitable to study rare diseases or diseases with a short duration
- Cannot estimate incidence of conditions
- Associations identified may be difficult to interpret
- Susceptible to bias due to low response and misclassification due to recall bias
