Free listing: A method to gain initial insight of a food category

In free listing you ask informants to “list all the X you know about” or inquire “what kinds of X are there”; where X might be what is eaten at breakfast time, movie stars or dairy products. In this study 184 15–18 year old adolescents from a small town in Argentina were asked to list all the fruits they knew, whether they had tasted them or not and whether they liked them or not. Middle/high-income respondents listed significantly higher number of fruits than lower-income respondents: 18.1 and 16.6, respectively. Fruits listed most frequently were: banana, orange, apple, grape, peach, pear, melon, strawberry, kiwi, mandarin and watermelon. It can be hypothesized that elements listed close together by a respondent are more associated than elements listed farther apart. The hypothesis that the difference in rank between two fruits would provide a natural measure of the distance between them in the mind of each respondent was corroborated by cluster analysis.