Analysis of research strategies to determine colour preference II: AFC, rank-order and rating

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