cross-sectional survey design

Definition:
Cross-sectional survey design: A research design that describes changes over time using respondents who reflect temporal differences such as age ( but data collection occurs at one point in time ).

Notes
The reason for this is not so obvious: Cross - sectional designs confound time with subject differences. That is because as time changes ( five years to 10 years to 15 years, etc. ), so do naturally occurring differences in people.

Example
Let's presume that a cross-sectional study shows that reading teachers ' beliefs about reading are more phonics based the more years they have been in the classroom. Does this mean that teachers become more phonics oriented with increasing experience in the classroom? Not necessarily. It may be that teachers ' attitudes don't change at all with increasing experience. Teachers with 15 and 20 years of experience simply learned how to teach reading using phonics when they were in teacher training programs 15 or 20 years ago, and they have been using phonics ever since. And the more recently trained teachers ( those with one or five years of experience ) learned to teach reading using whole-language methods more than phonics, and quite possibly, they will continue to use this method even after they have 20 years of experience. In other words, it may be that teachers ' methods and attitudes don't change at all over time; it only looks that way in a cross-sectional design because participants at each time interval are different.