Multidimensional Scaling Introductory Overview - Applications
The "beauty" of Multidimensional Scaling is that we can analyze any kind of distance or similarity matrix. These similarities can represent people's ratings of similarities between objects, the percent agreement between judges, the number of times a subjects fails to discriminate between stimuli, etc. For example, MDS methods used to be very popular in psychological research on person perception where similarities between trait descriptors were analyzed to uncover the underlying dimensionality of people's perceptions of traits (see, for example Rosenberg, 1977). They are also very popular in marketing research, in order to detect the number and nature of dimensions underlying the perceptions of different brands or products (for detailed descriptions of various examples see, for example, Green & Carmone, 1970).
In general, MDS methods enable the researcher to ask relatively unobtrusive questions ("how similar is brand A to brand B") and to derive from those questions underlying dimensions without the respondents ever knowing what is the researcher's real interest.