Subjective Textile Testing

Current consumer demands have led to increased interest in subjective evaluation of textile properties, but their assessment is often carried out by using techniques which cannot be justified as strictly valid. Tests in which a standard comparison is available are usually more likely to correlate well with objective measures, but the design of valid subjective tests is often imperfectly carried out. The mechanisms of subjective scaling are considered in this paper, which also examines several recent textile reports to determine the validity of their basic assumptions. Results obtained by arithmetically averaging ratings obtained from a scaling technique without objective validity should be regarded with suspicion, and theoretically sound methods (such as ranking or paired comparison), though less able to give convenient results, are more reliable in that they provide measures which have real meaning.