Assessors can use their own vocabulary instead of agreeing on descriptors

Evidence

Free-choice profiling (Williams and Langron, 1984): In free-choice profiling, subjects are assumed to differ mainly in the way they describe sensory characteristics and not so much in the way they perceive them. This allows assessors to first elicit the dimensions in the stimulus set and then to quantify the stimuli with the attributes following their own vocabulary. The effort used in panel training is thus considerably reduced because the difficult and time-consuming step of agreeing on the descriptors is side-stepped. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 940

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what free-choice profiling is and why it saves training effort.