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274 Communication Theory & Research
that could be understood as major points of attention in contemporary western
culture, including such things as health, beauty, male/female identities, work/
money/time considerations, the use of leisure, partner relations, family relations,
friends, culture, politics, economics and science.
Then, for each item, we formulated two polarized visions. For instance, for
‘male/female identities’, the corresponding statements were:

• Men and women are fundamentally equal. The roles society prescribes for
them should be abandoned.
• Men and women are fundamentally different. Therefore, society must permit
men to act as a true male and women to act as a true female.

Again, the complete questionnaire is available upon request. Respondents were
then asked to indicate on a seven-point scale how strongly they agreed either
with the vision on the left or with the vision on the right of the seven-point scale
(cf. a semantic differential).
Contrary to this ‘content-oriented’ part of the questionnaire, we added a third
section which has more to do with ‘form-oriented’ things.

Adding the concept of aesthetic styles

Many authors have argued that we live in a postmodern society. Although post-
modernism is a vague enough concept, some definitions of postmodernism
stress the aestheticization of everyday life (e.g. Featherstone, 1991: 65–82). Of
course, this aestheticization has profound implications for consumer culture.
Therefore, we wanted to add a section on aesthetic styles to our questionnaire.
The point of departure was that style preferences are perhaps most visible in
four ‘product’ categories: clothing, cars, houses and house interiors. For each
of those categories, we assembled 30 different and diverse pictures. Then 25
respondents – 11 males and 14 females, twelve aged between 18 and 30, six
between 31 and 45, and seven between 46 and 60 – were asked to perform a
natural grouping task. Natural grouping is a research technique where respon-
dents are asked to form ‘natural’ groups of stimuli, that is to group stimuli (here
pictures of clothing, cars, houses and house interiors) that have something in
common according to the feelings of the respondents. The results are then coded
in (4 × 25) similarity matrices. Through multidimensional scaling, one can then
produce two-dimensional scatterplots, showing which pictures ‘naturally’ group
together. We then asked the respondents to provide proper style labels for each
group of stimuli. For clothing, cars, houses and house interiors, this procedure
resulted each time in seven different aesthetic styles.
In the final questionnaire, each of these 28 styles were visualized by two photo-
graphs and then presented to the respondents. They were asked to rate each style
on a seven-point scale according to how appealing they found each of these
styles, i.e. according to their personal taste. Again, the complete pictorial ques-
tionnaire is available upon request from the author.