Anchoring Vignettes
Anchoring vignettes are a survey method for making self-assessments comparable across people and cultures. When respondents are asked to rate their own political efficacy, health, or freedom on an ordinal scale, different groups interpret the scale differently — what one culture calls 'a lot of freedom' another calls 'some.' This differential item functioning makes raw self-reports incomparable. The method, introduced by King, Murray, Salomon, and Tandon in 2004, has each respondent also rate several hypothetical characters described identically to everyone, then uses those vignette ratings to recover where each respondent's own scale lies and to rescale their self-assessment onto a common metric.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- King, G., Murray, C. J. L., Salomon, J. A., & Tandon, A. (2004). Enhancing the Validity and Cross-Cultural Comparability of Measurement in Survey Research. American Political Science Review, 98(1), 191–207. · DOI 10.1017/S000305540400108X
- King, G., & Wand, J. (2007). Comparing Incomparable Survey Responses: Evaluating and Selecting Anchoring Vignettes. Political Analysis, 15(1), 46–66. · DOI 10.1093/pan/mpl011
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.