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Examples of repeated cross-sections (RCS) include daily tracking polls of political opinions during campaigns, monthly Current Population Surveys of unemployment, yearly national health interview surveys, and quadrennial election studies of presidential voting. Each iteration is a distinct sample, as opposed to panels in which the same people are interviewed two or more times. By asking the same questions on repeated survey samples from the same population, RCS studies allow us to track trends and to establish causal inferences. One analytic challenge is to maintain both the representativeness and the comparability of samples as fieldwork methods or sources change.
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