I have just understood it from the story…’ Using vignettes in educational research to investigate cultural tolerance

The vignettes approach has emerged as a popular tool in quantitative and qualitative research. It has proven to be particularly effective in measuring sensitive topics. This paper focuses on the construction and validation process of questionnaire-based vignettes, which were used as an instrument to examine Omani secondary school girls’ cultural tolerance pre- and post-implementation of a school-based intervention. A total of 241 girls completed the vignettes-based questionnaires, of whom 116 were in the experimental group and 125 in the control group. This was followed by a semi-structured interview. The interview was conducted before and after the intervention with 16 participants, of whom eight were from the experimental group and eight from the control group. The study shows that vignettes are useful in generating a sophisticated understanding of abstract concepts. Vignettes offer the possibility of investigating tolerance in a context-related situation, eliminating possible misinterpretation of the questionnaire statements. Future research should be directed towards examining the effectiveness of different types of vignettes and the efficacy of vignettes as a research and teaching and learning tool.