Visual vignettes for cross-national research

Abstract

ABSTRACT Textual vignettes are a widely popular research tool, but they assume literacy and reading comprehension skills that limit their utility for both research with disadvantaged populations and cross-national research. We describe a new visual vignette approach, based on approaches used in studying populations with lower verbal ability, that avoids the issues raised by live actors while also reducing reliance on written language typical to textual vignettes. We examine the effectiveness of our new visual vignette using a survey experiment in which respondents were exposed to either a visual vignette, or a textual vignette, depicting the same interaction. We found that our visual vignette produced similar results when compared to traditional textual vignettes, confirming their utility. Additionally, we report on a pilot data collection using a cross-national sample, in which English literacy cannot be assumed. Our results indicate that our new method should improve research options both with low literacy populations and foreign language speakers.