The assessment of fabric hand involves two major classes of variables: fabrics as stimuli with certain physical properties, and people as judges with certain traits. This research investigated the tactile sensory assessment of selected fabrics that varied in specified physical dimensions—namely : stiffness, roughness, and thickness—replicated in two fiber contents: cotton and polyester. In the analysis- of-variance design, physical dimensions of fabrics were taken as fixed, rather than random, variables, and judges as blocks. The subjective-hand properties were measured by polar adjectives using a 99-point certainty scale, transformed to normal deviates. Sensory responses of judges to the nine pairs of polar adjectives differed significantly with respect to all four main effects: fiber content, stiffness, roughness, and thickness. The sensitivity of the 99-point certainty scale resulted in a wide range of F values; various interactions were clarified by graphic analysis. Editing of data for suspected errors in responses caused few changes in the ANOVA results.

An instrument was developed to examine a person's perception of fashion risk in clothing, relative to his or her self‐esteem. Fashion risk is the uncertainty a consumer perceives when making a choice involving a fashion good, in addition to the uncertainty perceived when a good is not subject to fashion. Items were written or adapted to represent self‐esteem, self‐ esteem related to clothing, perceived fashion risk, and economic, social, psychological, and performance risks related to clothing. Approximately 400 university students, half males and half females, responded to the instrument. Response patterns of males and females differed; therefore data were factor analyzed separately for each sex. Eleven factors were derived for females, eight for males. Factor content was similar, but fac tor structure was different. For females, factors representing fashion interest formed one cluster and factors representing self‐esteem and social approval a separate cluster, the two clusters being completely uncorrelated. For males, factors did not cluster. Fashion risk seems to be a part of other types of risk rather than a distinct type of risk. Also, perception of fashion risk seems not to be linearly related to self‐esteem.

A total of 510 rural farm and 630 city families in Iowa, Illinois, and Nebraska were inter viewed in detail about their consumption of household textiles during a 1‐year period in 1970–71. Goals of the project were to describe the consumption process and to develop bud gets for household textiles; this paper reports some findings on the first goal. Analysis of data was mainly by multiple regression. Farm and city families were similar on most measures of household textiles consumption; apparent differences in spending resulted from differences in income distri butions and proportions of families that moved. Income was positively related to expendi tures, assortment owned, and acquisition of items from several supplementary sources, but results obtained using dummy variables revealed that these relationships were sometimes complex. If a family had moved during the year, its expenditures were markedly higher than those of comparable families that had not moved. Age of wife (perhaps representing length of time since family formation) was inversely related to several variables. Unex plained variance remained high although many different equations were tried; great varia tion is probably characteristic of household textiles consumption.

In two separate projects, female university students responded to eight dress styles and male students responded to eight men's suit styles. Styles represented current, classic, newly‐introduced, and outdated fashions. Responses to polar adjectives showed that subjects could discriminate among styles that were in different stages of the fashion cycle and that they perceived different patterns of risk in styles that were in different temporal categories. Subjects preferred current and classic styles to newly‐introduced and outdated styles; the order of preference among styles was more closely related to aesthetic appeal (an element of social‐psychological risk) than to economic or per formance risk. In general, both sexes chose the same adjectives to describe their best‐ liked styles. Responses of males and females were similar in most respects, although research procedures differed between the two projects.

Are consumer preferences for fashions affected by whether styles are presented in photographs or drawings? Does mode of presentation of stimuli influence responses obtained in research? These were questions addressed in this experiment. Stimuli were photographs of five styles of evening wear and drawings of the same styles. Female university students responded to each stimulus on 19 pairs of polar adjectives; preferences were expressed in full forced‐choice paired comparisons. Mode of presentation made no difference in preferences for the five styles. Responses to specific styles differed between photographs and drawings for five of the 19 pairs of polar adjectives, but the quantitative effect of mode of presentation was very small. Order of preference for the styles was most closely linked with the word pairs dated‐current and ugly‐beautiful.