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I'll post more later when I get a break at work. Literally today I'm submitting a journal article for publication on top of a full clinical day.
In medical and in scientific research contexts I've never heard the distinction raised between "being" and "becoming", but it's an interesting way of organizing it.
Briefly, prospective studies that are controlled allow much greater inference about causality. For example, taking two identical cohorts with a disease, giving one a drug and the other a placebo, and following them over time to a pre-determined outcome measure will help you determine whether the drug is responsible for therapeutic or adverse events. There are various kinds of prospective trials.
Cross-sectional research and retrospective research only allows correlations to be made, and thus causality is much more difficult to establish.
This figure is from a great series in The Lancet on research methods. I know one of the authors. There is a lot of good info in this series that I could link.
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