- The act of measurement involves comparing an object to some standard of measurement. The standard is sometimes called an anchor or a gold standard. Without this standard, measurement will be invalid or meaningless. For survey data, anchors can be external, as when voter turnout reports are validated with information from public records, or when health self-assessments are compared to direct medical tests. Anchoring vignettes provide a comparatively inexpensive way of creating an anchor within the survey context itself. The idea is to compare respondents' self-assessments to the respondents assessments of hypothetical people described in short vignettes that have known characteristics, and to use the latter to adjust the former.
- By describing levels on a particular concept that are fixed across respondents, vignettes provide scale anchors that enable interpersonal comparisons. In combination with the chopit statistical model or our nonparametric alternative, anchoring vignettes can be used to adjust for differences in the way individuals use ordinal response categories.
- Anchoring vignettes also may be used as a bridge between different items on the same domain. For example, having vignette ratings on two different items relating to mobility allows for comparisons of the response category cutpoints on the two items and for both items to contribute to the estimation of respondents' mobility levels. Related items in different survey instruments may also be linked through the use of vignettes.
- The technique is also very useful for measuring complicated concepts that are hard to define fully in theory, but can be defined with reference to examples.
Anchoring Vignettes
- Frequently Asked Questions
- About this document
- Introduction
- Statistical Analyses with Anchoring Vignettes
- Survey Instrumentation
- Are universally applicable, culture-independent survey questions possible?
- Can I use anchoring vignettes if I don't have variables to predict the thresholds?
- Can I use anchoring vignettes to understand why respondents understand survey questions in such different ways?
- Can we avoid DIF by using a panel design, without vignettes?
- Do I need one vignette for each response category?
- Doesn't Anchoring Vignettes merely move the problem of coming up with DIF-free survey questions back one level (from self-assessments to vignettes), and so in the end you have the same problem?
- How is this strategy affected by the finding in social-psychology that assessments of oneself and others differ?
- How many anchoring vignettes should I ask for each concept I want to measure?
- How much expense will anchoring vignettes add?
- If I have a direct physical measurement, such as a medical test, do I need anchoring vignettes?
- In what order should vignettes and self-assessment questions be asked?
- Is there a simpler way of asking questions so we can avoid any statistical analysis?
- Should I ask vignettes questions of all people or a random subset?
- Should the vignette describe the age, sex, etc., of the hypothetical person? Should it be self-referential?
- What are the requirements
- What empirical evidence do you have that it works?
- What has to go wrong for anchoring vignette corrections to bias my results?
- What issues should I consider when writing vignettes?
- When do anchoring vignettes make the most difference?
- Why Use Anchoring Vignettes?
- Why will anchoring vignettes work when we know that putting educational achievement tests on a common scale has not been possible?
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