What Everyone Should Know About Rankings and Ratings

Rankings and ratings are essential questioning techniques for market research.  Here’s a quick look at what each one does and when to use it:

Ranking questions ask the research participant to place several variables in priority order – #1, #2, #3, and so on. Each variable ranked is either higher or lower than the other variables – no two share the same ranking. It’s a good way to measure choices, such as a favorite color. Rating questions ask participants to assign a value (importance, performance, satisfaction, etc.) to each variable individually. Here two variables can share the same rating, and often do.

As to which is best for your research project, it depends on the study objectives.  Ratings are often best for separating “must haves” from “nice to have” features.  It’s the freedom to assign a value to each individual variable – even if the respondent believes 5 out of 15 variables are “most important”.

Rankings are generally best if you already know which features are “must haves” – then you can ask respondents to choose one variable over another (such as notebook price vs. battery life).

One point to keep in mind about rankings is they can get confusing for the respondent.  Most of us don’t think about the top ten features we want in a new rackmount server, and respondents can get bogged down thinking about which feature should be at which rank.  We recommend no more than 5-7 variables be ranked for online surveys and a maximum of 3-5 variables for telephone interviews.