ABSTRACT
The methods discussed in this chapter deal with similarities/dissimilarities (proximities) data. Similarities data is relational and organized as a square matrix, where the stimuli comprise both the rows and the columns. For example, suppose a group of respondents are asked to judge how similar 10 countries are to one another. That is, each respondent is asked to compare every unique pair of countries and assign to each unique pair an integer score from zero (meaning the countries are essentially identical) to ten (the countries are completely different). This is an example of dissimilarities data, because the higher the assigned score the more dissimilar the respondent judges the stimuli to be. Consequently, this data can be treated as distances between the 10 countries.
