The Factorial Survey Experiment on “Normative Judgements of Work-Care Arrangements” in the German Family Panel

摘要: The German Family Panel (pairfam) 1 regularly includes factorial survey experiments. In Wave12 of the panel study a factorial survey experiment focusing on normative judgements of work-care arrangements was implemented. The term “work-care arrangements” refers on the one hand to “work” in the form of paid and unpaid work within the family and on the other hand to “care” in the form of parental childcare as well as other forms of non-parental informal childcare or day care. Here, we focus on the combination of mothers’ and fathers’ employment and use of day care. Factorial surveys are an effective instrument to measure norms and attitudes as their experimental nature makes it possible to compare the effects of different influences on respondents’ decisions. Respondents are usually asked to evaluate an outcome variable based on different scenarios (vignettes) of hypothetical situations or individuals. The vignettes describe potentially relevant characteristics (dimensions) with different levels that vary randomly across vignettes. Due to this specific design, factorial surveys make it possible to disentangle underlying judgement principles and are less subject to social desirability bias than direct (single item) attitude questions. Moreover, they are able to include even rare combinations of characteristics for which subsamples in other surveys would be too small