SynthesisBMC medical research methodology2008
Vignette studies of medical choice and judgement to study caregivers' medical decision behaviour: systematic review.
Synthesis in BMC medical research methodology, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 68 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
68 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Perceived difficulty and appropriateness of decision making by General Practitioners: a systematic review of scenario studies.BMC health services research · 2014Pooled it
- Designing randomized-controlled trials to improve head-louse treatment: systematic review using a vignette-based method.The Journal of investigative dermatology · 2014Pooled it
- Trial
- Does resuscitation status affect decision making in a deteriorating patient? Results from a randomised vignette study.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2016Trial
- Supplementing cross-cover communication with the patient acuity rating.Journal of general internal medicine · 2013Trial
- Physician variability in treating pain and irritability of unknown origin in children with severe neurological impairment.Pain research & managementTrial
- Pre-procedural disclosure of potential diagnostic errors in radiology: public perspectives in the Netherlands.European radiology · 2026Article
- Designing a web-based factorial survey experiment on diagnostic evaluation of cardiovascular symptoms in emergency care.Research and practice in thrombosis and haemostasis · 2026Article
- French intensive care physicians' practices for the management of high-risk patients with invasive candidiasis: results from the multicenter INSPIRE survey.Annals of intensive care · 2026Article
- Distinguishing anchoring from confirmation bias in diagnostic vignette studies: methodological implications for clinical decision-making.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Unconscious bias in students of health professions - an experimental vignette study.BMC medical education · 2025Article
- The use of vignettes in studies on mental disorders in low- and middle-income countries in the East Asia and the Pacific region: A scoping review.PCN reports : psychiatry and clinical neurosciences · 2025Review
- Heterogeneity of treatment preferences in the absence of guideline recommendations - a case vignette study in colorectal cancer tumor boards in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.BMC gastroenterology · 2025Article
- The variation of coverage and access to palliative care for cancer patients in eight European countries: an exploratory vignette approach.BMC palliative care · 2025Article
- Development of GROVE: A Guideline for RepOrting Vignette Experiments conducted in a healthcare context.Patient education and counseling · 2025Article
- Long-Term Management and Therapeutic Sequencing for Patients with Relapsing Multiple Sclerosis in France: A Vignette Study.Neurology and therapy · 2025Article
- Assessing use of eau recommendations in diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for chronic pelvic pain syndrome: a case vignette study on dutch pelvic floor physiotherapists practices.BMC women's health · 2025Article
- Patients' psychosocial attributes and aggressiveness of cancer treatments near the end of life.The oncologist · 2025Article
- The illusion of empathy: evaluating AI-generated outputs in moments that matter.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- A case vignette study to refine the target group of an intermediate care model: the Acute Geriatric Community Hospital.European geriatric medicine · 2024Article
8 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundVignette studies of medical choice and judgement have gained popularity in the medical literature. Originally developed in mathematical psychology they can be used to evaluate physicians' behaviour in the setting of diagnostic testing or treatment decisions. We provide an overview of the use, objectives and methodology of these studies in the medical field.
methodsSystematic review. We searched in electronic databases; reference lists of included studies. We included studies that examined medical decisions of physicians, nurses or medical students using cue weightings from answers to structured vignettes. Two reviewers scrutinized abstracts and examined full text copies of potentially eligible studies. The aim of the included studies, the type of clinical decision, the number of participants, some technical aspects, and the type of statistical analysis were extracted in duplicate and discrepancies were resolved by consensus.
results30 reports published between 1983 and 2005 fulfilled the inclusion criteria. 22 studies (73%) reported on treatment decisions and 27 (90%) explored the variation of decisions among experts. Nine studies (30%) described differences in decisions between groups of caregivers and ten studies (33%) described the decision behaviour of only one group. Only six studies (20%) compared decision behaviour against an empirical reference of a correct decision. The median number of considered attributes was 6.5 (IQR 4-9), the median number of vignettes was 27 (IQR 16-40). In 17 studies, decision makers had to rate the relative importance of a given vignette; in six studies they had to assign a probability to each vignette. Only ten studies (33%) applied a statistical procedure to account for correlated data.
conclusionVarious studies of medical choice and judgement have been performed to depict weightings of the value of clinical information from answers to structured vignettes of care givers. We found that the design and analysis methods used in current applications vary considerably and could be improved in a large number of cases.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.