A European perception of food using two methods of correspondence analysis

In a recent issue of this journal, Guerrero et al. (2010) studied an interesting data set involving the analysis of consumer-driven associations to the word ‘‘Traditional”, from a food perspective, in six European countries. As part of their analysis, they demonstrated the sources of association between the words studied and the country of origin of those interviewed using correspondence analysis. In this paper, we focus on this association by assuming that the country of origin is a predictor of the words associated with “Traditional”. This analysis is performed using another member of the correspondence analysis family – non-symmetric correspondence analysis. This paper will also explore the use of both these correspondence analysis techniques on their data and consider the dendrogram and the semantic differential plot as alternative approaches to visually summarising the association.