Some reading while working on my research proposal:
Vignette methodologies for studying clinicians’
decision-making: Validity, utility, and application in
ICD-11 field studies
Abstract
Vignette-based methodologies are frequently used to examine judgments and decision-making processes, including clinical judgments made by health professionals. Concerns are sometimes raised that vignettes do not accurately reflect “real world” phenomena, and that this affects the validity of results and conclusions of these studies. This article provides an overview of the defining features, design variations, strengths, and weaknesses of vignette studies as a way of examining how health professionals form clinical judgments (e.g., assigning diagnoses, selecting treatments). As a “hybrid” of traditional survey and experimental methods, vignette studies can offer aspects of both the high internal validity of experiments and the high external validity of survey research in order to disentangle multiple predictors of clinician behavior. When vignette studies are well designed to test specific questions about judgments and decision-making, they can be highly generalizable to “real life” behavior, while overcoming the ethical, practical, and scientific limitations associated with alternative methods (e.g., observation, self-report, standardized patients, archival analysis). We conclude with methodological recommendations and a description of how vignette methodologies are being used to investigate clinicians’ diagnostic decisions in case-controlled field studies for the ICD-11 classification of mental and behavioural disorders, and how these studies illustrate the preceding concepts and recommendations.
Evans, Roberts, Keeley, Blossom, Amaro, Garcia, . . . Reed. (2015). Vignette methodologies for studying clinicians’ decision-making: Validity, utility, and application in ICD-11 field studies. International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, 15(2), 160-170. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijchp.2014.12.001
Abstract
Vignette studies use short descriptions of situations or persons (vignettes) that are usually shown to respondents within surveys in
order to elicit their judgments about these scenarios. By systematically varying the levels of theoretically important vignette characteristics a large
population of different vignettes is typically available – too large to be presented to each respondent. Therefore, each respondent gets only
a subset of vignettes. These subsets may either be randomly selected in following the tradition of the factorial survey or systematically selected
according to an experimental design. We show that these strategies in selecting vignette sets have strong implications for the analysis and
interpretation of vignette data. Random selection strategies result in a random confounding of effects and heavily rely on the assumption of no
interaction effects. In contrast, experimental strategies systematically confound interaction effects with main or set effects, thereby preserving
a meaningful interpretation of main and important interaction effects. Using a pilot study on attitudes toward immigrants we demonstrate the
implementation and analysis of a confounded factorial design.
Atzmüller, C., & Steiner, P. (2010). Experimental Vignette Studies in Survey Research. Methodology: European Journal of Research Methods for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, 6(3), 128-138. DOI: 10.1027/1614-2241/a000014
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965
