Book excerpt: Multidimensional Similarity Structure Analysis comprises a class of models that represent similarity among entities (for example, variables, items, objects, persons, etc.) in multidimensional space to permit one to grasp more easily the interrelations and patterns present in the data. The book is oriented to both researchers who have little or no previous exposure to data scaling and have no more than a high school background in mathematics and to investigators who would like to extend their analyses in the direction of hypothesis and theory testing or to more intimately understand these analytic procedures. The book is repleted with examples and illustrations of the various techniques drawn largely, but not restrictively, from the social sciences, with a heavy emphasis on the concrete, geometric or spatial aspect of the data representations.