Analysis of research strategies to determine individual color preference: N-alternative forced choice, rank-order, rating and paired comparison

Exploring an efficient research method for understanding color preference is important to researchers and designers. This work compares four experimental methods for individual color preference research (N-alternative forced choice, rank-order, rating and paired comparison). Three psychophysical experiments were carried out with 338 participants. Participants were presented with six color patches (red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple) arranged in a random order. This work suggested orange is the strongest preferred color and green is the weakest preferred using three individual color preference experimental methods with six hues. The Monte Carlo Analysis method further compares the result performance for four methods, which suggests the rating, paired comparison and rank-order methods are more stable than the N-alternative forced choice method when only a small number of participants take part in the experiment. For studies involving small numbers of participants (even less than 6), the rating, rank-order and pair comparison methods should be preferred.

Automated summary

Exploring efficient research methods for understanding color preference is crucial for researchers and designers. This study compared four experimental methods (N-alternative forced choice, rank-order, rating, and paired comparison) for individual color preference research. Three psychophysical experiments were conducted with 338 participants, who were presented with six randomly arranged color patches (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple). The findings indicated that orange was the most preferred color, while green was the least preferred, using three individual color preference experimental methods with six hues. The Monte Carlo Analysis method further suggested that rating, paired comparison, and rank-order methods were more stable than the N-alternative forced choice method, particularly for studies involving a small number of participants (even less than 6).