Abstraction in Experimental Design Brutger Ryan
Abstraction in Experimental Design Brutger Ryan Political scientists designing experiments often face the question of how abstract or detailed their experimental stimuli should be. Yet, we have…
Specifikacia Abstraction in Experimental Design Brutger Ryan
Abstraction in Experimental Design Brutger Ryan
Political scientists designing experiments often face the question of how abstract or detailed their experimental stimuli should be. Yet, we have reason to question this tradeoff, and there is relatively little systematic evidence to rely on when calibrating the degree of abstraction in studies. Typically, this question is framed in terms of tradeoffs relating to experimental control and generalizability: the more context introduced into studies, the less control, and the more difficulty generalizing the results.
First, we provide a theoretical framework which identifies and considers the consequences of three dimensions of abstraction in experimental design: situational hypotheticality, actor identity, and contextual detail. We make two contributions. Second, we field a range of survey experiments, varying these levels of abstraction.
We find that situational hypotheticality does not