A vignette in

psychological Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

and

sociological Sociology is the scientific study of human society that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. The term sociology was coined in ...

experiments presents a hypothetical situation, to which

research Research is 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 attentiveness to ...

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 syste ...

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

social norms A social norm is a shared standard of acceptance, acceptable behavior by a group. Social norms can both be informal understandings that govern the behavior of members of a society, as well as be codified into wikt:rule, rules and laws. Social norma ...

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 A variable is considered dependent if it depends on (or is hypothesized to depend on) an independent variable. Dependent variables are studied under the supposition or demand that they depend, by some law or rule (e.g., by a mathematical function ...

. 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 this statistics, quality assurance, and survey methodology, sampling is the selection of a subset or a statistical sample (termed sample for short) of individuals from within a statistical population to estimate characteristics of the whole ...

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 fact ...

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 Everyday life, daily life or routine life comprises the ways in which people typically act, think, and feel on a daily basis. Everyday life may be described as mundane, routine, natural, habitual, or Normality (behavior), normal. Human diurna ...

References

See also