Comparison of check-all-that-apply and forced-choice Yes/No question formats for sensory characterisation Sara R. Jaeger a , Rafael S. Cadena b , Miriam Torres-Moreno c , Lucía Antúnez b , Leticia Vidal b , Ana Giménez b , Denise C. Hunter a , Michelle K. Beresford a , Karrie Kam a , David Yin a , Amy G. Paisley a , Sok L. Chheang a , Gastón Ares b,⇑ a The New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research Ltd., 120 Mt Albert Road, Private Bag 92169, Auckland, New Zealand b Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología de Alimentos, Facultad de Química, Universidad de la República, Gral. Flores 2124, C.P. 11800 Montevideo, Uruguay c Food, Health and Welfare Research Group, Universitat de Vic, Sagrada Família 7, 08500 Vic, Barcelona, Spain article info Article history: Received 22 December 2013 Received in revised form 28 January 2014 Accepted 8 February 2014 Available online 15 February 2014 Keywords: CATA Consumer research Yes/No questions Research methodology Applicability scoring abstract The application of check-all-that-apply (CATA) questions for sensory product characterisation is gaining acceptance and popularity. This question format has been reported to be a quick and reliable means of gathering sensory profiles from consumers, concurrently with hedonic assessment. However, a limitation of CATA questions is that they do not encourage deep processing by respondents. Forced-choice ques- tions, where respondents answer ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’ for each term, may encourage systematic processing and be useful when consumers undertake sensory profiling tasks. This research compared sensory pro- files elicited by consumers using CATA questions or forced-choice Yes/No questions and contribute to ongoing investigations of CATA questions and related question formats with a view to developing guide- lines for best practise. Across seven consumer studies with 600+ consumers and multiple product cate- gories, consistent evidence was obtained that forced-choice Yes/No questions are associated with higher term citation frequencies. However, this did not consistently translate into greater product discrimina- tion. Conclusions regarding similarities and differences amongst samples and the stability of sample and term configurations were generally independent of question format (i.e., whether the sensory data were elicited by CATA or forced-choice Yes/No questions). Overall, the comparison of CATA and forced- choice Yes/No questions for sensory characterisation suggested parity of the two question formats. This extended to consumers’ perceived difficulty and tediousness for completing the test. Regardless of ques- tion format, consumers, on average, perceived the tests as easy and not tedious. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Descriptive analysis with trained panels is a powerful and fre- quently used methodology for describing the sensory characteris- tics of products (Lawess & Heymann, 2010). Accurate and reliable product information is obtained, but the time and resources needed for implementation is significant (Murray, Delahunty, & Baxter, 2001; Varela & Ares, 2012). For this reason, interest in the development of novel methodologies for sensory characterisation that provide reliable results in short time frames has been increas- ing (Valentin, Chollet, Lelièvre, & Abdi, 2012; Varela & Ares, 2012). Check-all-that-apply (CATA) questions, introduced in sensory research by Adams, Williams, Lancaster, and Foley (2007) are one of the approaches that has been gaining popularity. A CATA question is a variant of the multiple choice question format in which respon- dents are presented with a list of words or phrases and are asked to select all the options they consider applicable/appropriate (Driesener & Romaniuk, 2006). The application of CATA questions has been reported to be a quick and reliable means of gathering information about consumer perception of the sensory characteris- tics of food/beverage products, providing similar information to that obtained using descriptive analysis with trained assessors (Ares, Barreiro, Deliza, Giménez, & Gámbaro, 2010; Bruzzone, Ares, & Giménez, 2012; Dooley, Lee, & Meullenet, 2010; Jaeger et al., 2013). Additionally, CATA questions can be used concurrently with acceptability measurement, without significant risk of hedonic bias (Jaeger & Ares, 2014; Jaeger et al., 2013), hereby enabling two types of product insights being generated in a single study. Despite several advantages, a disadvantage of the CATA ques- tion format is that it does not encourage deep processing by respondents (Krosnick, 1999; Sudman & Bradburn, 1982), who http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2014.02.004 0950-3293/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +598 29248003; fax: +598 29241906. E-mail address: gares@fq.edu.uy (G. Ares). Food Quality and Preference 35 (2014) 32–40 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Food Quality and Preference journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/foodqual