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Validating Vignette Designs with Real-World Data: A Study of Legal Mobilization in Response to Land Grievances in Rural China – CORRIGENDUM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2025

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Abstract

Information

Type
Corrigendum
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of SOAS University of London.

In a recent effort to replicate the results, the authors discovered an error in the code to produce Table 3 of the article. The corrected table and the accompanying text are below (corrected text is in bold). The authors apologize for the error.

p. 594 corrected paragraph

The data also allow us to identify the specific factors potentially undermining valid descriptive inference. In the real world, the costs of behaviour are highly salient. When taking action over grievances, costs include time, money and political risk, among others. Table 3 presents reasons given by respondents for not taking any given action for both hypothetical and real land grievances.33 Strikingly, the lack of power (specifically, “the power of the other party is too great”) is the second single most important reason (reported by 18 27 per cent of respondents) for not taking action in the context of real-world grievances, while it is a minor factor (reported by only 2 3 per cent of respondents) in the hypothetical vignette. The data show, perhaps surprisingly that lack of knowledge is equally less salient for aggrieved households in the real world (23 9 percent, compared to 21 24 per cent responding to the hypothetical vignette), suggesting that, for those who do take action, experiencing a real grievance may drive searches for knowledge and knowledge acquisition, something unanticipated by respondents to the hypothetical vignette. Similarly, time, money and the risk of losing connections are not obstacles to taking action in the context of real-world land disputes. Finally, not surprisingly, 20 21 per cent of respondents to the hypothetical vignette cite the lack of importance (specifically, “too trivial”), while only 6 8 per cent of respondents with real-world grievances cite this reason for taking no action, i.e. “lumping it.”

p. 595 corrected table

Table 3. Reasons for Taking No Action in Hypothetical and Real-world Land Disputes

Source: Author’s survey.

p. 598 corrected sentence

Yet Indeed, Table 3 2 shows that in the hypothetical scenario, 2 per cent of some respondents cite the lack of money as a reason for not taking action, whereas 6 per cent of no respondents with actual grievances cite the lack of money as a reason for taking no action.

References

Whiting, S. H., and Ma, X. 2021. Validating Vignette Designs with Real-World Data: A Study of Legal Mobilization in Response to Land Grievances in Rural China. The China Quarterly, 246, pp. 586601. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741020000570.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Figure 0

Table 3. Reasons for Taking No Action in Hypothetical and Real-world Land Disputes