Experimental Vignette Studies in Survey Research

Vignette studies use short descriptions of situations or persons (vignettes) that are usually shown to respondents within surveys in order to elicit their judgments about these scenarios. By systematically varying the levels of theoretically important vignette characteristics a large population of different vignettes is typically available – too large to be presented to each respondent. Therefore, each respondent gets only a subset of vignettes. These subsets may either be randomly selected in following the tradition of the factorial survey or systematically selected according to an experimental design. We show that these strategies in selecting vignette sets have strong implications for the analysis and…