Vignette Question

A vignette is a sort of “illustration” in words. In survey research, a vignette question describes an event, happening, circumstance, or other scenario, the wording of which often is experimentally controlled by the researcher and at least one of the different versions of the vignette is randomly assigned to different subsets of respondents.

For example, imagine a vignette that describes a hypothetical crime that was committed, and the respondents are asked closed-ended questions to rate how serious they consider the crime to be and what [Page 948]sentence a judge should assign to the perpetrator. The researcher could experimentally alter the wording of the vignette by varying six independent variables: the gender, race, and age of both the victim and perpetrator. If two ages (e.g., 16 and 53), three races (Asian, black, and white) and both genders (female and male) were varied for both the victim and perpetrator, the resulting design—a 2 × 3 × 2 × 2 experiment—would yield 24 different versions of the vignette. In the typical use of this approach, one of these 24 versions would be randomly assigned to each respondent. This would allow the researcher to test for three main effects (age, gender, race), three two-way interaction effects, and one three-way interaction effect.

The experimental use of vignettes has been enhanced greatly with the advent of computer-assisted survey data collection such as CAPI, CASI, and CATI. No longer do researchers need to print hard copies of multiple versions of a questionnaire to deploy randomly to respondents. Instead, the computer software randomly serves up the version or versions of the vignette to any one respondent, thus balancing the allocation of the different versions easily and correctly across the entire sample.

Another way vignettes are used in survey research is illustrated as follows. A vignette question could describe a protagonist (or group of protagonists) faced with a realistic situation pertaining to the construct under consideration. The respondent is asked to make a judgment about the protagonist, the situation, or the correct course of action, using some form of closed-ended response. Sociologist Harry Triandis and colleagues developed a series of scenarios (vignettes) designed to measure respondents' cultural orientation. One vignette simply stated, You and your friends decided spontaneously to go out to dinner at a restaurant. What do you think is the best way to handle the bill? Four response options were provided: (a) split it equally, without regard to who ordered what, (b) split it according to how much each person makes, (c) the group leader pays the bill or decides how to split it, (d) compute each person's charge according to what that person ordered. For this particular measure, respondents were asked to rank their top two options. This particular study consisted of a series of 16 different vignettes, each with a unique set of response options, all designed to assess some aspect of cultural orientation.

Vignette questions are flexible and can be used to measure many different types of attitudes and beliefs or scenarios. They are especially useful when trying to measure complex concepts that may be best described by way of example.

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