Introduction
Have you ever been asked to measure respondents' preferences for things such as brands, product features, job-related benefits, or product packaging? What about prioritizing a list of performance attributes or gauge the potential impact of different advertising claims? If so, you should consider MaxDiff (best-worst scaling), a popular item scaling technique within Lighthouse Studio.
MaxDiff is a survey research approach for obtaining preference/importance scores for multiple items (brand preferences, brand images, product features, advertising claims, etc.). MaxDiff is a component within Sawtooth Software's Lighthouse Studio platform. It may be used for designing, fielding, and analyzing:
•MaxDiff (best-worst scaling) experiments
•Method of Paired Comparisons (MPC) experiments (choices from pairs)
•First ("Best" only) choices from subsets of three items, four items, etc.
Projects may be conducted over the Internet, using devices not connected to the internet (CAPI interviewing), or via paper-and-pencil questionnaires.
MaxDiff makes it easy for researchers with only minimal exposure to statistics to conduct sophisticated research for the scaling of multiple items. MaxDiff is robust and easy to apply (for example, easier than the related conjoint analysis). The resulting item scores are also easy to interpret, as they may be placed on a positive scale where the scores sum to 100.
