How children approach a CATA test influences the outcome. Insights on ticking styles from two case studies with 6–9-year old children

Martina Galler,Tormod Næs,Valérie L Almli,Paula Varela

doi:10.1016/j.foodqual.2020.104009

Martina Galler, Tormod Næs + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2020.104009

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Abstract

Due to its simplicity, Check-all-that-apply (CATA) is a promising method for consumer studies with children to generate sensory and other descriptions of samples, and to find their drivers of liking. This paper explores how children’s approach to the CATA test influences the outcome, based on two case studies that illustrate suitable setups for CATA tests with children of the age group 6–9. The children's approach to the CATA task was described with ticking style indicators based on which three ticking style groups were defined. One group ticked only a few attributes probably due to cognitive limitations, e.g. lack of reading skills, limited vocabulary or ability to focus on the task. The second group gradually increased their number of ticked attributes per sample over the test, while the third subgroup ticked a steady number of attributes throughout the test. The two latter groups are likely to represent different test strategies: one using the CATA list relatively to the sample space, and one using the CATA list as in a more absolute way. Analysis regarding data validity assessed by the detection of pre-defined Design of Experiment (DoE) sample differences and the alignment to a trained panel using Quantitative Descriptive Analysis (QDA) revealed that ticking style played a crucial role. This study shows the importance of analysing “ticking style” as a validation strategy for CATA tests run with children and as a tool to gain insights into underlying test strategies.

Highlights

Rapid sensory methods such as Check-all-that-apply (CATA) and Projective Mapping are used in a broad range of applications, both in research and industry (Delarue, Lawlor, & Rogeaux, 2015; Varela & Ares, 2012)
We defined three ticking style indicators to describe and group the children based on their usage of the CATA list: number of ticks, standard deviation of the number of ticks per sample, and number of different attributes used in the test
The distribution of the ticking style indicators is displayed as a histogram, the lower plots show the correlation between the variables as scatter plot, and the upper squares display their Pearson correlation values

Summary

Introduction

Rapid sensory methods such as Check-all-that-apply (CATA) and Projective Mapping are used in a broad range of applications, both in research and industry (Delarue, Lawlor, & Rogeaux, 2015; Varela & Ares, 2012) These methods can produce similar results as traditional descriptive methods with the advantage that they are more flexible and less time consuming. Rapid methods have been validated both in studies with trained panellists (Dehlholm, Brockhoff, Meinert, Aaslyng, & Bredie, 2012) and with consumers (Ares, Barreiro, Deliza, Giménez, & Gámbaro, 2010; Bruzzone, Ares, & Giménez, 2012; Dooley, Lee, & Meullenet, 2010; Jaeger et al, 2013) As validation, they mainly used the comparison to results generated with traditional descriptive methods. Chheang, Yin, Bava, Gimenez, Vidal, and Ares (2013) evaluated the within-assessor reproducibility of several CATA datasets with repetitions generated by consumers

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