The heterogeneous catalysis for esterification generally uses a poly(styrene-divinylbenzene) sulfonated resin. It presents a selective affinity with the chemical species involved in the reaction, and a coupled phenomenon of swelling. The components partitioning rests on still not precisely known interactions between the chemical species and the intern structure of catalyst. Although the chemical reaction is supposed to be located in the resin structure, most of the proposed kinetic models do not involve the sorbed components. Due to reaction processes, the sorption and kinetic phenomena cannot be independently studied. First part of the methodology is the analysis of selective sorption in absence of reaction at room temperature. The swelling phenomenon study at reaction temperature then allows the simultaneous determination of kinetic and sorption coupled parameters. It permits to design a more realistic kinetic model of the heterogeneous esterification reaction, to estimate the parameters and to validate them on experimental data obtained with esterification reactions in a batch reactor. (C) 2014 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.