The Use of Vignettes in Survey Research

1978/01/01 by Cheryl S. Alexander, Cheryl Alexander, Henry Jay Becker · 1,157 citations
Engineering · Mathematics · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Applied psychology #Engineering #Law #Mathematics #Political science #Psychology #Qualitative Research Methods and Applications #Range (aeronautics) #Replication (statistics) #Respondent #Social psychology #Statistics #Survey research #Vignette

paper · doi:10.1086/268432

published in Public Opinion Quarterly 42(1), 93 (Oxford University Press)

openalex publication_date 1978/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

The use of vignettes—systematically elaborated descriptions of concrete situations–is supported as a means of producing more valid and more reliable measures of respondent opinion than the “simpler” abstract questions more typical of opinion surveys. The fractional replication experimental design described here enables a wide range of situation characteristics to be included and varied in the presentations made to various respondents while minimizing the number of different vignette versions required for the research instrument. Results from a study of police and nurse reactions to crime victims are shown as an example of this technique

Cited by

• Challenging Liberal Principles: Understanding of Democracy among Populist Radical Right Youth Leaders in Austria and Germany
• Detailing social influence in predicting cinema attendance: a vignette approach
• Neutralization: New Insights into the Problem of Employee Information Systems Security Policy Violations1
• Relational trustworthiness: How status affects intra-organizational inequality in job autonomy
• The Past, Present and Future of Factorial Survey Experiments: A Review for the Social Sciences
• Does HIV status affect attitudes on welfare deservingness? A survey experiment on welfare policy in the US
• But it came from a food pantry: Product stigma and quality perceptions of food pantry offerings
• Seeing the Trees or the Forest? The Effect of IT Project Managers’ Mental Construal on IT Project Risk Management Activities
• Reasons to Reduce: A Vignette-Experiment Examining Men and Women’s Considerations to Scale Back Following Childbirth
• Causal Inference in Conjoint Analysis: Understanding Multidimensional Choices via Stated Preference Experiments
• Social Class, Gender, and Contemporary Parenting Standards in the United States: Evidence from a National Survey Experiment
• Coping with Favoritism in Recruitment and Selection: A Communal Perspective
• Vignette Methodology and Culture-Relevance: Lessons Learned through a Project on Successful Aging with Iranian Immigrants to Sweden
• Influence of patient race on physician prescribing decisions: a randomized on-line experiment. [europepmc]
• Evaluating the drivers of and obstacles to the willingness to use cognitive enhancement drugs: the influence of drug characteristics, social environment, and personal characteristics. [europepmc]
• Establishing a composite endpoint for measuring the effectiveness of geriatric interventions based on older persons' and informal caregivers' preference weights: a vignette study. [europepmc]
• Facebook Influence among Incoming College Freshmen: Sticky Cues and Alcohol. [europepmc]
• A structured approach to a diagnostic of collective practices. [europepmc]
• Identifying the components of clinical vignettes describing Alzheimer's disease or other dementias: a scoping review. [europepmc]
• Exploring preferences for domain-specific goal management in patients with polyarthritis: what to do when an important goal becomes threatened? [europepmc]
• Facebook Displays as Predictors of Binge Drinking: From the Virtual to the Visceral. [europepmc]
• Do Words Matter? Stigmatizing Language and the Transmission of Bias in the Medical Record. [europepmc]
• Gender equality in sickness absence tolerance: Attitudes and norms of sickness absence are not different for men and women. [europepmc]
• Methods to improve quality performance at scale in lower- and middle-income countries. [europepmc]
• Framing Bias in the Interpretation of Quality Improvement Data: Evidence From an Experiment. [europepmc]
• Patients' views of wearable devices and AI in healthcare: findings from the ComPaRe e-cohort. [europepmc]
• Users' acceptance of electronic patient portals in Lebanon. [europepmc]
• Training in psychotherapy: a call for embodied and psychophysiological approaches. [europepmc]
• Changing Patient and Public Beliefs About Antimicrobials and Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Using a Brief Digital Intervention. [europepmc]
• The use of experimental vignette studies to identify drivers of variations in the delivery of health care: a scoping review. [europepmc]
• Public Stigma Toward Female and Male Opium and Heroin Users. An Experimental Test of Attribution Theory and the Familiarity Hypothesis. [europepmc]
• Trust in the Health System and COVID-19 Treatment. [europepmc]
• Exploring variation of coverage and access to dental care for adults in 11 European countries: a vignette approach. [europepmc]
• Vignette Research Methodology: An Essential Tool for Quality Improvement Collaboratives. [europepmc]
• Cooperative behavior in the workplace: Empirical evidence from the agent-deed-consequences model of moral judgment. [europepmc]
• Humans perceive warmth and competence in artificial intelligence. [europepmc]
• Caring for older patients with reduced decision-making capacity: a deductive exploratory study of ambulance clinicians' ethical competence. [europepmc]
• General practitioners' decision-making process to prescribe pain medicines for low back pain: a qualitative study. [europepmc]

Related

• The Vignette Technique in Survey Research
• Complexity, Learning Effects and Plausibility of Vignettes in the Factorial Survey Design
• Designing Multi-Factorial Survey Experiments: Effects of Presentation Style (Text or Table), Answering Scales, and Vignette Order
• Using Experimental Vignettes to Study how Survey Methods and Findings Affect the Public's Evaluation of Public Opinion Polls: Considering a Dual Process Approach
• Fear of the Dark? A Systematic Comparison of Written Vignettes and Photo Vignettes in a Factorial Survey Experiment on Fear of Crime