1994 Volume 21 Issue 2 Pages 131-147
A new multidimensional unfolding method is developed. The most important advantage of the proposed method is that the goodness of fit criterion is constructed on the basis of the response model of ranking behavior so that the analysis never fails to arrive at a solution space where data and distances correspond in their rank order as much as possible. This implies that the method guarantees elimination of such degeneracies as caused by minimizing the so-called stress measure at the expense of order correspondences between the data and the model as is often the case with the conventional nonmetric unfolding approach. The method is applied to two sets of real data for illustrative purposes.