Abstract:
Among sensory and food scientists, the 9-point hedonic scale has been the most
commonly used scale for measuring liking and disliking of products. Recently, the
Labeled Hedonic Scale (LHS) was developed to overcome some recognized limitations
of the 9-point hedonic scale. One of the claimed advantages of the LHS is the ability to
provide ratio-level data, which can be extremely useful when making product
comparisons. The current study was aimed to confirm that the LHS can produce ratiolevel
data in a product development setting, where samples only differ slightly, by
comparing it with magnitude estimation (ME), which yields ratio-level data. Subjects
(N= 40, 12 M, 28 F, Age range: 19-32) attended two separate testing sessions. During
each session, they used one of the two scaling methods (i.e., LHS, ME) to rate their liking
and disliking of two product systems (cherry flavored Kool-Aid and vanilla custard) with
varying sucrose concentrations (0.14, 0.20, 0.28, 0.40, 0.56 M). The results indicated that
the LHS yielded data that were not significantly different to that obtained using ME for
both product systems (repeated measures ANOVA, p>0.05), implying that the LHS, in
fact, produced ratio-level data. The results also indicated that the LHS offered slightly
better discrimination power than ME. The present study demonstrates the potential utility
of the LHS as a tool in food development that enables sensory scientists to make
statements about proportional (ratio) differences in liking and disliking among samples.
