Qualitative analysis of the elicited words
The elicited associations were qualitatively analyzed. First, a search for recurrent terms within each package was performed. Terms with similar meaning were grouped into different categories within each package. This classification was performed independently by three researchers considering personal interpretation of the meaning of the words and word synonymy as determined by a Spanish dictionary. The three researchers had previous experience in analyzing qualitative data from open-ended-questions and word association tasks. After individually evaluating the data, a meeting of the researchers was undertaken in order to check the agreement between their classifications. The final categories and their names were determined by consensus between the three researchers considering their three independent classifications and discussion between them. This triangulation technique has been used by other authors dealing with qualitative techniques (Guerrero et al., 2009, Modell, 2005 and Wadsworth, 2000). Categories comprising terms mentioned by more than 10% of participants were considered. Frequencies in each category were determined by counting the number of participants that used those words to describe the concept. Then, associations from the different packages with similar meaning were merged. This task was carried out by the three researchers that performed the classification of terms. Frequencies of word counting in each category were calculated for each package. Chi-square was calculated for evaluating differences in consumers’ perception of the milk dessert packages.