How to create and administer scripted video-vignettes in an experimental study on disclosure of a palliative breast cancer diagnosis

ObjectiveScripted consultations provide the opportunity to vary and study the effect of specific elements of medical communication. These scripted consultations are role-played, videotaped and then judged by analogue patients. Most studies applying this methodology have provided little insight into how they created internally and externally valid written and role-played scripts. In this paper we aim to address this gap by providing a detailed description of a scripted video-vignette study's methodology.MethodsFollowing the five phases of creating and implementing scripted video-vignettes the current study's methodology is described: (1) deciding if video-vignettes are appropriate, (2) developing a valid script, (3) designing valid manipulations, (4) converting the scripted consultations to video, (5) administering the videos in an experiment.ResultsFollowing these phases and four validation steps internally and externally valid vignettes were developed.ConclusionsThe detailed description of the current study's methodology produced general recommendations for scripted video-vignette studies, such as the importance of validating both the written as well as the role-played scripts and involving both experts and lay people in validating the scripts. For other choices no golden standard exists.Practice implicationsThe presented methodology and recommendations may serve as a source of inspiration for future scripted video-vignette studies.