A vignette in psychological and sociological experiments presents a hypothetical situation, to which research participants respond thereby revealing their perceptions, values, social norms or impressions of events.
For example, to study normative judgments of family status, "there might be 10 levels of income; 50 head-of-household occupations, and 50 occupations for spouses; two races, white and black; and ten levels of family size".
[2] Since this approach can lead to huge universes of stimuli – half a million in the example – Rossi proposed drawing small random samples from the universe of stimuli for presentation to individual respondents, and pooling judgments by multiple respondents in order to sample the universe adequately.
[3] Vignettes in the form of sentences describing actions have been used extensively to estimate impression formation equations in research related to affect control theory.
However, an obvious disadvantage of this method is that reading a vignette is different from experiencing a stimulus or action in everyday life.