CATA and RATA questions for product-focused emotion research: Five case studies using emoji questionnaires

Questionnaires are popular in product-focused emotion research with consumers. Ease of implementation is paramount in this regard, as is versatility. In the presented studies, focus is directed to scaling variations as an element of methodological versatility, and a comparison is performed of CATA and RATA question formats (check-all-that-apply and rate-all-that-apply, respectively). Five studies, with a range of tasted products and food/beverage names were conducted, involving 908 consumers in New Zealand, China and Korea. Emoji questionnaires, recently established as a methodological variant in product-elicited emotion research, were used. The average percentage of emoji used for describing samples was similar for CATA and RATA questions when used in Central Location Tests with tasted samples, but higher for RATA than CATA questions in online surveys. Discriminative ability of CATA and RATA questions was linked to the characteristics of the focal samples. The recommendation for method choice is to use CATA emoji-questions when samples have distinct emotional associations, whereas RATA seems better able to discriminate between samples with more similar emotional profiles. Neither CATA nor RATA emoji-questions were regarded by consumers as difficult or tedious.