What Students Need To Know About Cohort Study Design In Clinical Research.

In clinical research, our aim is to design a study, which would be able to derive a valid and meaningful scientific conclusion using appropriate statistical methods that can be translated to the “real world” setting. Before choosing a study design, one must establish aims and objectives of the study, and choose an appropriate target population that is most representative of the population being studied. The conclusions derived from a research study can either improve health care or result in inadvertent harm to patients. Hence, this requires a well-designed clinical research study that rests on a strong foundation of a detailed methodology and is governed by ethical principles. From an epidemiological standpoint, there are two major types of clinical study designs, observational and experimental. Observational studies are hypothesis-generating studies, and they can be further divided into descriptive and analytic. Descriptive observational studies provide a description of the exposure and/or the outcome, a