25 years of factorial surveys in sociology: A review

The aim of the factorial survey approach is to uncover the social and individual structures of human judgements of social objects. By having respondents evaluate samples of vignettes (fictive descriptions), in which several factors describing the object of interest are simultaneously manipulated, this approach has a number of advantages over traditional social survey research. The aim of the present article is to provide an easy-to-follow overview of the various ways in which the approach has been applied within sociology between 1982 and 2006. The review, which is based on 106 articles published in central sociology journals, is organised into three different sections: “factorial survey applications”, “factorial survey designs” and “factorial survey analyses”.