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Study on Factors of Favorable Wet Cotton Hand Towels “Oshibori”

2012; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5057/kei.11.19

2185-7865

Yasuhiro Soeta, Takuma Kitamoto, Hiroshi Hasegawa, Masao Kasuga,

Ergonomics and Musculoskeletal Disorders

In the present study, we evaluated important factors of the feelings of comfort associated with wet cotton hand towels, or oshibori. First, the following adjectives were extracted as words used to evaluate the characteristics of the oshibori: “large,” “pretty,” “comfortable,” “high-grade,” “shapely,” “soft,” “favorite,” “thick,” “clean,” “moist,” “luxurious,” “heavy,” “strong,” “safe,” “good-touch,” and “rare.” We then conducted a subjective evaluation of 25 kinds of oshibori of various sizes and thicknesses. Forty males and twenty-four females, ranging in age from their twenties to fifties, participated in the experiment. Each subject evaluated the oshibori by grading them from one to five based on the extracted descriptive characteristics. Factor analysis was conducted on the experimental results and the following three factors were extracted; the first factor defined as “dignity factor,” the second factor defined as “preference factor,” and the third factor defined as “touch factor.” The score for dignity increased as the size of the oshibori increased. The score for preference was high when the size of the oshibori was between 25 cm × 25 cm and 30 cm × 30 cm. These results suggest that subjects felt high-class if the size of the oshibori was greater than 30 cm × 30 cm, but subjects most preferred oshibori that were between 25 cm × 25 cm and 30 cm × 30 cm. No notable trend was found between the thickness of oshibori and the three factors. We then analyzed the experimental data focusing on the following viewpoints; “gender” and “generation.” of the subjects, and discussed how these factors effected on the feelings of oshibori using the Mann-Whitney U test and the Kruskal-Wallis H test. The analyzed results show that the female subjects tended to evaluate more highly on the evaluation words of “thick,” “moist,” and “heavy,” that the evaluations of “large,” “pretty,” “comfortable,” “high-grade,” “shapely,” “soft,” “favorite,” “thick,” “moist,” “luxurious,” “heavy,” “strong,” “safe,” “good-touch,” and “rare” varied depending on generation.