Investigating the European perception of food using moments obtained from non-symmetrical correspondence analysis

The perception of food in Europe has been a topic of research for many years due to its importance in better understanding the role of food in helping to define the culture of a country. It is also important from a marketing perspective for identifying how consumers relate to food. Recently, this topic was discussed by Guerrero et al. (2010) who used a graphical statistical technique called correspondence analysis to identify the association between the countries that participated in the study and words that were linked with ‘‘Traditional’’ food. This paper explores the use of non-symmetrical correspondence analysis and provides an interpretation of the configuration of points in the graphical display in terms of its first four moments. In particular, we will focus on the skewness and kurtosis of such a configuration. Such measure’s provide further detail on the nature of the association between the countries studied and the words linked with ‘‘Traditional’’ food.