Abstract
A lexicon had been developed to identify and describe emotional feelings occurring during
coffee drinking; however, those emotion terms were in English. Translation of those terms
into Thai to be used with Thai consumers is not easy because each language has a structure
that is unique to it. Some terms that are commonly used to describe feelings of people of
western culture may not apply to those of Thai culture, and vice versa. The objective of this
research was to develop Thai emotion lexicon for coffee drinking through a sequence of two
methods; word association and check-all-that-apply (CATA). In the first part, the word
association method was used to gather all possible terms that described emotional feelings
and experiences related to coffee drinking of Thai respondents. One hundred Thai coffee
drinkers participated in the interview in which the respondents were asked to freely identify
terms that described their emotional feelings before, during and after drinking a good and a
bad cup of coffee. Fifty-eight emotion terms were obtained from the interview. In the second
part, emotion terms generated from such interview and those from the EsSense ProfileTM
(ESP), WellSense ProfileTM and Coffee Drinking Experience (CDE) profile were combined
into a list of 98 terms. The terms from the ESP, WellSense ProfileTM and CDE profile were
carefully translated into Thai by a linguist and then translated back to English by another
linguist to verify the accuracy of translation. The combined terms were further refined
by 130 Thai coffee drinkers using check-all-that-apply (CATA) method via online
questionnaires. A frequency of 20% was chosen as a cut-off point. The final list comprised of
32 terms, 18 being generated by Thai coffee drinkers and 14 terms from the ESP, WellSense
ProfileTM and CDE profile. The list of emotions could be applied toward future emotion
research with Thai coffee users.
