You are a practicing health professional and you are intrigued with the possibility of a link between mental health issues and excessive 'screen time'. People are commonly found with eyes glued to their phones and other digital devices that are commonly available these days and there is a surge in mental health related issues and problems. You have already searched the current literature but unfortunately most studies had flaws that you could easily identify. You are considering doing your own research to explore the potential link.

You think about six study designs (listed below) and what each would involve. For example, which aspect of mental health you will specifically focus on, how you will carry out the study, what sort of study participants you will need for each design, what information should be collected to investigate this link, what measure of association/effect can be obtained from each design, what will be one specific confounding factor individually for each of the six study designs and how or why each confounder will affect the findings of your study for every design. There will be no mark for repetition of same confounding factor for more than one study design.

You will briefly describe the above aspects as one paragraph for each of the following designs while following the formatting & line-limit instructions provided below.

I have already completed a-c

A) Cross-sectional study

I will design this study by focusing on the mental health anxiety issue. I will carry out this study by sending out a survey. I need a cross section of a population of a community to be able to formulate if there is a link between screen time and anxiety. This can be achieved by sending out a survey to first year Curtin students. The information that I will collect would be if each participant has a phone, how many hours they spend on their phone?, what is the major purpose they use their phone for? If they experience anxiety and to rate their anxiety levels on that day from a scale from 1-10 ( 1 being little to none and 10 being extremely anxious). This will then measure the prevalence ratio of anxiety in this population with those who have a phone and those who don't. A confounding factor would be other life stresses such as academic stress that can be the reason why a participant experiences anxiety.

B) Case Control study

I will carry out this study by recruiting two groups, one group that experiences anxiety and takes medications for it and another group that does not experience anxiety thus does not take medications for it. This can be done by a structured interview to measure odds ratio. The study participants must be familiar in age from 18-22 and equal distribution of gender of both groups. The information gathered from each case and control would be to report their exposure of screen time and many hours a day they spend on an electrical device. A confounding factor that can impact the findings can be each participants socio-economic status as not everyone who experiences anxiety can afford medications to ease them of its impacts.

C) Prospective Cohort study.

I will carry out this study design by following a group of individuals who do not experience anxiety over a week. I will collect data before and after instructing half the cohort no to spend more that 1 hour a day on an electronic device while the other half have no limit. The participants must be around the age of 18-22 and equal distribution of gender on both groups. After a week, I will assess each participants anxiety levels to analyse the relative risk as a measure of effect before and after the exposure. A confounding factor that can impact the findings is financial stress that can lead the participants to develop anxiety.

D) Retrospective Cohort study.

E) Quasi-experimental study.

F) Randomized Controlled Trial.

(No need to worry about the ethics for e and f parts); this is a hypothetical exe

rcise to assess your understanding of various study designs).

Q1 Note 1: Please be specific. No marks will be given for writing general design features from ilectures. We want you to 'apply' your knowledge of study designs in light of the above given scenario/description. Write in direct language e.g. I will carry out this study by.......

10 lines maximum for each part,(10 lines DO NOT mean ten sentences or ten statements).