Lack of evidence that concurrent sensory product characterisation using CATA questions bias hedonic scores

Abstract

In response to the growing use of consumers for sensory product characterisation, methodological research contributing to development of best practise guidelines is ongoing. We focus here on concurrent elicitation of hedonic and sensory product characterisation by check-all-that-apply (CATA) questions. Jaeger et al. (2013b) reported that CATA questions only caused weak and transient bias of co-elicited hedonic scores. In the current research six studies were conducted, in which more than 700 consumers took part. Five product categories were tested (rice crackers, lite bread, cheese, kiwifruit, black currant drinks) with 4–7 samples per study. In none of these studies was evidence obtained suggesting bias of hedonic scores and it is now possible to conclude with greater certainty that co-elicitation of hedonic scores and product attribute information using CATA questions is unlikely to bias hedonic scores. A second result of the current research was that the use of designs that rotate presentation order of CATA terms was not associated with hedonic bias, and neither was the use of the forced Yes–No CATA question format. In future research, in light of a strong dominance of positive CATA terms used in these studies, we recommend studying more thoroughly the influence of positive/negative/neutral words in CATA lists as a possible source of hedonic bias. An exploratory component to this research suggested that consumers perceive the concurrent elicitation of hedonic and CATA responses as easy, but that too many samples may make the task tedious.