Comparison between American and Chinese consumers in the use of verbal and numerical 9-point hedonic scales and R-Index ranking for food and personal products

Abstract

The food industry is now global, so that hedonic comparisons for various products may need to be made between consumers from different countries. Using the 9-point hedonic scale, it has been shown that East Asians use a significantly smaller range of scores than Americans; they are essentially using different scales, rendering comparisons between the two sets of consumers problematic. There is a necessity for a culture-free method of hedonic numerical assessment, which is not affected by such ‘cultural range variation’. American and Chinese consumers assessed candies, toothbrushes and pens, using the regular verbal 9-point hedonic scale as well as a purely numerical version. As expected from previous studies, the Chinese consumers tended to have a significantly smaller range of responses than the American consumers, although the effect was not as strong for the purely numerical 9-point hedonic scale. This meant that Chinese consumers were often using a shorter scale than the Americans, making comparisons between the two groups problematic. However, a ranking protocol with an R-Index analysis was also used. With this protocol, the range of responses for the Chinese and Americans was the same, being equal to the number stimuli being ranked, circumventing the problem of ‘cultural range variation’.