Compare methods

	Audit Experiment	Survey Experiment
Field	Political Science	Political Science
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2011	2011
Originator	Butler & Broockman (political responsiveness audits); Bertrand & Mullainathan (correspondence-audit lineage)	Experimental political science; synthesized by Diana Mutz
Type	Randomized field experiment using matched fictitious requests	Randomized experiment embedded in a survey
Seminal source	Butler, D. M., & Broockman, D. E. (2011). Do Politicians Racially Discriminate Against Constituents? A Field Experiment on State Legislators. American Journal of Political Science, 55(3), 463–477.	Mutz, D. C. (2011). Population-Based Survey Experiments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691144528
Aliases	Correspondence study, Field audit study, Discrimination audit, Responsiveness audit	Population-based survey experiment, Survey-embedded experiment, Question-wording experiment, Framing experiment
Related	4	4
Summary	An audit experiment, also called a correspondence or field audit study, sends matched but fictitious requests to real-world targets — such as legislators, landlords, or employers — while randomizing a single treatment cue, then compares the rate and quality of responses. In political science the canonical design follows Butler and Broockman's 2011 study of U.S. state legislators, which varied the putative race signaled by a constituent's name to measure discrimination in responsiveness.	A survey experiment embeds a randomized experiment inside a survey: respondents are randomly assigned to different versions of a question, frame, or stimulus, and their answers are compared to estimate a causal effect. By combining the internal validity of randomization with the representative samples and rich measurement of survey research, survey experiments — especially population-based ones — let political scientists draw causal inferences about how information, framing, or message attributes shape public attitudes and behavior.