Vignette Methodology

1. Introduction

Recently, vignettes methodology has been gradually adopted by researchers in education in a broad sense (e.g., Demol et al., 2021; Jaspers et al., 2022; Liu and Yu, 2021) and in applied linguistics in specific (e.g., Bielak and Mystkowska-Wiertelak, 2020; Goetze, 2023). According to Rashotte (2003), vignettes are real-life like cases or scenarios that are given to participants who are expected to point out their feelings, experiences, expectations, or assumptions on the given episodes. Vignettes “are an efficient, and effective, way of collecting data about how people would act in situations that are outside of the purview of other methods because of their sensitive nature, prohibitive cost, or infrequent occurrence” (Collett & Childs, 2011, p. 513). Moreover, they fit well for investigating topics or phenomena that are “not easy either for investigators to ask or for respondents to answer” (Stravakou and Lozgka 2018, p. 1191) given that they offer ‘depersonalization and distancing effect’ (Khanolainen & Semenova, 2020, p. 2). Hence, it could be suggested that vignettes have the potential to serve a variety of purposes ranging from complementary means of data collection alongside quantitative research to representing the whole research design in educational or applied linguistic research. According to Skilling and Stylianides (2020), vignettes are multipurpose tools owing to their flexibility in style, their use, as well as their viability in various contexts.

Researchers in a wide range of areas, including health, business, social work, or political science have popularly utilized the vignette methodology (e.g., Hughes & Huby, 2004; Jenkins et al., 2015; Steiner et al., 2016). There seems to be broad agreement on the assumption that vignettes are good at eliciting data on beliefs or attitudes, even more so for emotionally-sensitive topics (Al Sadi & Basit, 2017), including bullying at schools (Khanolainen and Semenova 2020), race (Behm Cross 2017), or emotions in language learning and teaching process (e.g., Bielak & Mystkowska-Wiertelak; 2020). To be more specific, several researchers implemented the vignette methodology in investigating students’ reactions to bullying (Demol et al., 2021), emotion regulation of master students (Liu and Yu, 2021), teacher emotions (Goetze, 2023), emotional aspects of L2 learners (Bielak and Mystkowska-Wiertelak, 2020; Teimouri, 2018). Most of the researchers reported the viability of vignette methodology.

The present chapter aims to give an overview of the vignette methodology, iterate its pros and cons, give a brief literature review on vignette-based studies, expand the subject into the variations in vignette methodology including qualitative vignette experiments, and in addition to these suggest topics that could be studies through vignettes.