Question

Which of the following is considered a strength of observational studies?

• They are conducted in laboratory settings.
• They randomly assign patients to different treatment groups.
• They can address questions that would be unethical, impractical or impossible to address with experimental studies.
• They are susceptible to confounding.

Answer 1

Observational studies have strengths such as addressing questions that would be unethical or impractical to study experimentally, and being more cost-effective and having larger sample sizes than experimental studies.

Step-by-step explanation:

Observational studies have several strengths. One strength is that they can address research questions that would be unethical, impractical, or impossible to address with experimental studies. For example, it would be unethical to conduct an experiment on smoking and health by deliberately exposing subjects to tobacco smoke to see if they develop lung cancer. Observational studies are also generally cheaper and easier to conduct than experimental studies. They can also study more subjects and obtain a larger set of data compared to experimental studies.