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• Summary: The factorial survey approach, which was first introduced in the social sciences around the beginning of the 1980s, constitutes an advanced method for measuring human judgements of people or social situations. At the general level, this quasi-experimental approach involves presenting respondents with vignettes (fictive descriptions), in which selected characteristics describing the vignette ‘person’ or ‘situation’ are simultaneously manipulated. The aim of this article is to present a conceptual and an analytical framework for factorial survey studies of professional judgements in social work. • Findings: In the first part of the article, I develop and discuss the proposition that this approach may be used in order to study the contents of professional judgements about the diagnosis and treatment of clients. The ‘contents’ is discussed in terms of knowledge assumptions that practitioners explicitly and tacitly use as a basis for their professional judgements. Second, I outline a strategy for modelling social workers’ judgements. This modelling strategy proceeds from the possibilities afforded by multilevel regression analysis. • Applications: Findings from analyses of factorial survey data may reveal both professional agreement and disagreement in practitioners’ judgements. While results that reveal high levels of disagreement in judgements about what constitutes a particular diagnosis or about which intervention is the most suitable for a particular client may raise questions as regards the ‘professionalism’ of practitioners’ judgements, results that reveal professional agreement in diagnostic and treatment assumptions may be transformed into hypotheses that can be tested further in research.

With the aim of furthering the investigation of professional discretion, this article builds on a combination of a conceptual framework for understanding discretion and an advanced method for collecting data on human judgments. Discretion is described as consisting of two dimensions-a structural dimension (discretionary space) and an epistemic dimension (discretionary reasoning). Discretionary reasoning is defined as the cognitive activity that may take place within the discretionary space of professional judgment, and it is illustrated by means of Toulmin's model of argumentation. The factorial survey, a quasi-experimental vignette approach, is proposed and illustrated as a method with substantial potential for studying agreement and disagreement in discretionary reasoning. While the combined framework presented in this article could form the basis for case studies and/or comparative studies of discretionary reasoning across professions and contexts, the results of such studies could be used for improving practice within a specific professional field.

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