The Use of Vignettes in Survey Research

Abstract

MJ is FREQUENTLY argued that questionnaires and interviews are not well suited for the study of human attitudes and behavior because they elicit unreliable and biased self-reports. One source of this criticism is that judgments required of respondents are often too abstract. The result of posing vague questions is that each respondent will answer in terms of his own mental picture of the task before him.The obvious solution is to make the stimulus presented to the respondent as concrete and detailed as possible. Such a stimulus would more closely approximate a real-life decision-making or judgmentmaking situation. Furthermore, by holding the stimulus constant over a heterogeneous respondent population, the survey researcher gains a degree of uniformity and control over the stimulus situation approximating that achieved by researchers using experimental designs. The "vignette" is proposed as a means of doing this (Nosanchuk, 1972;Rossi et al. 1974).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

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