Understanding Research Study Designs PMC

Table Of Content

• Advantages of case–control studies
• The data can be a starting point for future research
• Understanding Research Study Designs
• The relevance of transversal competences in vocational education and training: a bibliometric analysis
• Study designs: Part 2 – Descriptive studies
• Bibliometric analysis
• Article Menu

In this context, employability, seen as having the skills, knowledge and attitude required to get a job, is gaining importance. The following studies investigate from different perspectives transversal competences in terms of competency gaps and employers’ demands. The aim was to identify the necessary modifications to make the CCBE model a valid instrument for assessing the level of compliance with the CBE. The results were positive and they showed that “teachers understood and interpreted the revised model as intended, were able to position their study programmes by using the revised model and that the content validity of the revised model was good” (Sturing et al. 2011, 191). They also highlight the need to conduct a longitudinal research on individual students' development process to understand how components of competence develop in relation to each other and how they integrate towards a more holistic professional competence.

Advantages of case–control studies

Reviewers consider the quality of the proposed contribution and whether it addresses topics of interest or raises relevant issues in systemic design. Editor’s Choice articles are based on recommendations by the scientific editors of MDPI journals from around the world.Editors select a small number of articles recently published in the journal that they believe will be particularlyinteresting to readers, or important in the respective research area. The aim is to provide a snapshot of some of themost exciting work published in the various research areas of the journal. Feature papers represent the most advanced research with significant potential for high impact in the field. A FeaturePaper should be a substantial original Article that involves several techniques or approaches, provides an outlook forfuture research directions and describes possible research applications.

The data can be a starting point for future research

Discourse analysis and Foucauldian discourse analysis can be adopted by the design studies scholar to further explore the above components. A Foucauldian approach specifically will analyze the power structures put in place, manipulated by, or used within a designed thing or object. This process can be particularly useful when the scholar intends to understand if the designed thing has agency or enables others to have agency. This study contributes to knowledge by focusing on the role of university, industry and doctoral students in increasing doctoral graduate employability. In his study, Fjellström (2014) describes and analyses students’ perceptions of vocational competence and identifies how this competence is built up.

Understanding Research Study Designs

Sometimes, controls are individually matched with cases for factors (except for the one which is the exposure of interest) which are considered important to the development of the outcome. For example, in a study on relation of smoking with lung cancer, for each case of lung cancer enrolled, one control with similar age and sex is enrolled. This would reduce the risk of confounding by age and sex – the factors used for matching.

The relevance of transversal competences in vocational education and training: a bibliometric analysis

Observation of teaching behaviour showed that teachers were working in the multifunctional environments required for establishing powerful learning environments and they tried to extend the authenticity of the learning environment. However, there was less variation in activities, learning material and learning contexts, in particular, when students were working and learning in a simulated environment. A global competitive environment, new management processes and new technologies that require employees to show autonomy, problem solving skills and a high degree of flexibility to adapt to the new circumstances and new technologies, characterize it. The current VET students have been in contact with new technologies (smartphones, tablets, video consoles) from an early age, so most of them have previous experience and prefer to use social media apps, text messages and blogs to interact and get information rather than the more traditional methods.

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Cross-sectional studies serve many purposes, and the cross-sectional design is the most relevant design when assessing the prevalence of disease, attitudes and knowledge among patients and health personnel, in validation studies comparing, for example, different measurement instruments, and in reliability studies. This paper describes the use of cross-sectional studies and provides examples within obstetrics and gynecology. Caveats are also described; for example, when cross-sectional data is used for analytical purposes of associations between an exposure and an outcome, authors and readers should be careful not to make causal inferences, unless the exposure may safely be assumed to be stable over time and not influenced by experiencing the outcome.

According to Barros (2019), STEM candidates received higher training in transversal skills from universities than in Social Sciences. The study found a divergence of transversal skill training between STEM and Social Sciences, where the former group appears to have profited more by teaching transferable skills. Nowadays, educators must adopt a motivating role, analyse the implications of the learning process and introduce new methodologies that help students to acquire the necessary skills for becoming lifelong learners. According to González-Peiteado and Rodríguez-López (2017), understanding how our students acquire knowledge is key for activating the learning process. However, we must not forget the role of policymakers and their interest in learning from the best examples of VET systems.

Bibliometric analysis

As discussed previously, in observational analytical studies, the exposure is naturally determined as opposed to experimental studies where an investigator assigns each subject to receive or not receive a particular exposure. In analytical observational studies, researchers try to establish an association between exposure(s) and outcome(s). Depending on the direction of enquiry, these studies can be directed forwards (cohort studies) or backwards (case–control studies). Graduate academies in Germany such as the University of Jena Graduate School in Germany prepares doctoral students for careers in academics, society and business by integrating interdisciplinary topics into specific programs and custom-made courses for transversal skills development. Doctoral programs offered by the University College Cork includes a wide range of modules to help doctoral students develop transversal skills such as scientific writing, communication and presentation skills (EC, 2011b).

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In the first three of these, data are collected on individuals, whereas the last one uses aggregated data for groups. A cross-sectional study does not need to have a control group, as the population studied is not selected based on exposure. In cross-sectional studies, researchers select a sample population and gather data to determine the prevalence of a problem.

Descriptive studies describe the characteristics of interest in the study population (also referred to as sample, to differentiate it from the entire population in the universe). In a case report, the researcher describes his/her experience with symptoms, signs, diagnosis, or treatment of a patient. Sometimes, a group of patients having a similar experience may be grouped to form a case series. In this article, we will look at the important features of various types of research study designs used commonly in biomedical research. For example, it might be true that there is no correlation between infant mortality and family income at the city level, while still being true that there is a strong relationship between infant mortality and family income at the individual level. All aggregate statistics are subject to compositional effects, so that what matters is not only the individual-level relationship between income and infant mortality, but also the proportions of low, middle, and high income individuals in each city.

Teamwork is considered to promote the acquisition of other soft skills (communication, collaboration, problem-solving, leadership, etc.) and emerges as the dominant skill across all the disciplines analysed. Vocational Education and Training (VET) programmes have included the acquisition of transversal competences in their curricula as a tool to increase employability. The number of researches has exponentially grown in the last years, emphasizing its relevance and the multiple approaches and factors involved in the learning process.