A vignette in

psychological Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between t ...

and

sociological Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation and ...

experiments presents a hypothetical situation, to which

research Research is "creativity, creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge". It involves the collection, organization and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular att ...

participants respond thereby revealing their

perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...

values In ethics and social sciences, value denotes the degree of importance of something or action, with the aim of determining which actions are best to do or what way is best to live (normative ethics in ethics), or to describe the significance of dif ...

social norms Social norms are shared standards of acceptable behavior by groups. Social norms can both be informal understandings that govern the behavior of members of a society, as well as be codified into rules and laws. Social normative influences or soci ...

or impressions of events. Peter Rossi and colleagues developed a framework for creating vignettes by systematically combining predictor variables in order to dissect the effects of the variables on

dependent variables Dependent and independent variables are variables in mathematical modeling, statistical modeling and experimental sciences. Dependent variables receive this name because, in an experiment, their values are studied under the supposition or demand ...

. For example, to study normative judgments of family status, "there might be 10 levels of income; 50 head-of-household occupations, and 50 occupations for spouses; two races, white and black; and ten levels of family size". Since this approach can lead to huge universes of stimuli – half a million in the example – Rossi proposed drawing small

random samples In statistics, quality assurance, and Statistical survey, survey methodology, sampling is the selection of a subset (a statistical sample) of individuals from within a population (statistics), statistical population to estimate characteristics o ...

from the universe of stimuli for presentation to individual respondents, and pooling judgments by multiple respondents in order to sample the universe adequately.

Main effect In the design of experiments and analysis of variance, a main effect is the effect of an independent variable on a dependent variable averaged across the levels of any other independent variables. The term is frequently used in the context of facto ...

s of predictor variables then can be assessed, though not all interactive effects. Vignettes in the form of sentences describing actions have been used extensively to estimate

impression formation Impression formation in social psychology refers to the processes by which different pieces of knowledge about another are combined into a global or summary impression. Social psychologist Solomon Asch is credited with the seminal research on impr ...

equations in research related to affect control theory.Heise, D. R., ''Surveying Cultures'', pp. 86-120 In this case, different respondents are presented with each sentence, and some are asked to rate how the actor seems during the event, others rate the object of action, and other respondents rate how the overall action makes the behavior seem. Subgroups of respondents receive different sets of event sentences, and the subgroup data are pooled for final analyses. Vignettes enable controlled studies of mental processes that would be difficult or impossible to study through observation or classical experiments. However, an obvious disadvantage of this method is that reading a vignette is different from experiencing a stimulus or action in everyday life.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Vignette (Psychology) Psychology experiments Sociological terminology