Structured vignette—We presented our constructs in the form of a story recorded on tape about Mr (or Mrs) Ali, a person with diabetes. The story was first played in full and then played back slowly, sentence by sentence. After each sentence, the tape was stopped and the subject asked: “Do you agree that this person would have [acted in this way/thought this/etc]?” (A sample paragraph of the vignette is reproduced in the appendix.) The vignette included some deliberately incorrect statements to check that subjects were not simply agreeing with all the statements. This method was developed to avoid the problems, which have been well documented in nonEuropean cultures,11 of asking informants to respond to closed questions about their own beliefs or behaviour, which would require them to challenge directly statements made by the interviewer.
We performed the structured vignette study on a sample of 18 subjects, and repeated it on 10 of these same subjects after an interval of two months. The internal reliability of the technique was high (overall, 89% of questions received identical answers on repeat interview)