The aim of the present study was to measure intra-individual consistency in clothing evaluation and to examine its relation to the ratings. A sample of 167 female college students first rated photographs of eight styles of daytime wear on 13 pairs of polar adjectives and again after a 7-day interval.
Discrepancy scores for each subject (the intra-individual consistency in the evaluation) was obtained by computing the absolute arithmetic difference between the two ratings on the same set of scales. Based on the scores, the subjects were classified into three groups : high, medium, and low intra-individual consistency. Analysis of variance of mean ratings by the three groups revealed that significant differences existed in 34 of 104 combinations of the eight styles of clothing and the 13 semantic differential scales. Mean ratings of the subjects with low intra-individual consistency were closer to 4, the neutral rating on the seven point scale, as compared to those of the subjects with high intra-individual consistency.
Mean correlation coefficients for style evaluation subscales, image evaluation subscales, and synthetic evaluation subscales were 0.43, 0.47, and 0.76 respectively. Correlation coefficients for each style of clothing obtained from the mean score of the subjects in each semantic differential scale were around 0.98, indicating that the mean scores of the subjects in each scale could yield excellent stability in clothing evaluation.