Warm up and presentation devices experimented in a conjoint-choice survey on preferences for jobs

We embedded a multifactorial experiment into a survey designed to collect data from graduates about the criteria they adopt while choosing a job opportunity. The experimental procedure consisted of three interconnected experiments: (a) a first one aimed to test how to ’warm up’ respondents before starting a conjoint measurement exercise; (b) a second one to contrast two different choice procedures: the ‘conjoint choice’ of one job from a set of offered ones versus the choice of the mostly appealing attribute of each of them, and (c) another experiment to infer the optimum size of the job choice set. Jobs were portrayed through a sample of two-through-six attribute levels randomly selected from a set of dichotomous attributes. The experiment was administered to 7,102 Padua University graduates, out of which 3,628 completed the questionnaire. The experiments showed that respondents have to be ‘warmed’ with soft questions, that in a conjoint exercise the choice of a job from a set seems to respondents more realistic than pinpointing a significant feature that describes it, and finally that presenting a number of three or four job opportunities at a time makes it the choice more plausible than either two or six jobs.