An examination of the Hofer and Sliwinski evaluation.

Although we fully endorse the thesis of Hofer and Sliwinski that all research designs and analytical procedures should be critically examined before accepting conclusions based upon them, in this commentary we question whether their critical examination is complete. In particular, we suggest that they neglected some disadvantages of longitudinal and narrow age range cross-sectional designs and that they may have been overly pessimistic with respect to the potential usefulness of cross-sectional designs for certain research questions. Copyright 2002 S. Karger AG, Basel