A cross-cultural study of users' craftsmanship perceptions in vehicle interior design

This paper investigates the user-perception of vehicle interior craftsmanship. A survey, involving subjects of two different nationalities (American and French), was conducted on a set of vehicles. Several tasks were asked of the subjects in order to study differences in craftsmanship perception, in particular, relative to the nationality of the subject. This paper proposes an interesting illustration of the use of social science techniques to investigate differences in the perception of products. Several analytic techniques such as Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), cluster analysis, analysis of variance, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and preference mapping are presented to scientifically study user-perceptions.