The Effect of Order of Presentation of Similarity Judgments on Multidimensional Scaling Results: An Empirical Examination

Order of presentation of objects might influence the similarity judgments provided by respondents. If so, the results obtained by MDS techniques are likely to be biased. To examine this possibility, several hypotheses were developed, an experiment was designed, and data were analyzed by use of multivariate analysis of variance. No significant differences due to the order effect were found in similarity judgments.