Vignette Experiment

A vignette experiment presents respondents with a short, carefully constructed description of a person, situation, or scenario — a vignette — in which one or more features are experimentally manipulated, and then asks for a judgment, attitude, or intended action. By randomizing which version of the scenario each respondent reads, the researcher isolates the causal effect of each manipulated feature on the elicited judgment, combining the realism of a concrete scenario with the causal leverage of an experiment.