A systematic examination of the nature and content of vignettes in schizophrenia research.

Background: Vignettes are often used in psychiatric research, yet there are few systematic studies on their content, creation, and use.

Aims: This article describes a study of: (a) how researchers create vignettes in research on schizophrenia and (b) how these vignettes portray individuals with schizophrenia.

Method: We conducted a systematic search of the PubMed database for articles between 2008 and 2012 that used vignettes to measure attitudes about schizophrenia.