A couple of weeks ago I attend a course on Free Choice Profilng which is a research method enabling qualitative data to be quantified more “scientifically"  <! --cynical thought:  because scientific enquiry always seems to have more credibility than any other…>

Free Choice profiling was devised to determine perceived  flavours in cheeses and ports, where tasters created lists of descriptive words which they then later ranked for each cheese/ port. Rather than being a yes/ no questionnaire or having terms defined by the researcher, the participants determined the terms to be used (hence the term “free choice profiling). This then has the potential to have a wider range of definitions and terms which may not occur to the researcher. The results are then calculated using GenStat (statistics package) with some customised software to establish areas of consensus amongst participants.

This method can be seen as wholistic rather than reductionist because the results process looks at areas of consensus as opposed to areas of difference. If you think of the classic placebo effect tests, they are usually searching for differences in the participants results to ascertain whether there is anything of significance going on.
But of course you can’t apply such methods to things like tasting wine and cheese, where it make more sense to work on  areas of consensuses where a critical mass of participants are holding similar views.

Dr Francoise Wemelsfelder has been a pioneer in using this methodology, particularly in areas of animal welfare, with the use of videos of livestock animals. Whilst I still have my reservations about the use of the technique in this way being anthropomorphic (attributing human emotions to animals), the actual process and Wemelsfelder’s use of visual material is for me an excellent  means finding answers to some questions my research has been asking.

Although I am an artist, I am the type of person who wants to be able to have repeatable results to illustrate my points. Free Choice Profiling is perhaps one way I can do this, given that the nature of my work is so subjective and based on people’s interpretations and emotional responses to images.