About

Nominal Group Technique

          The Nominal Group Technique is a structured process that helps a group reach consensus about the relative importance and/or priority of important issues or ideas using a weighted ranking process. The technique can be adapted to a range of situations and research questions where qualitative data must be gathered, and also provides an opportunity to quantify the relative importance of those data to a specific group through aggregated prioritization of votes.

The general process is:

  1. Participants jot down some preliminary thoughts on a given question during a 5 minute silent period
  2. Each participants is then asked to contribute a single idea along in a round-robin format
  3. Each reponse is captured and displayed in a list on the screen.
  4. The moderator will ask for clarification as needed and ask if what is written captures the main concept/idea in each contribution
  5. This process is repeated until no one has an additional item to contribute or until the group feels that all significant ideas have been captured
  6. Following another opportunity to modify items in the list, each participant will select the most relevant items to the question (i.e. Most important, or Most influential)
  7. Once everyone has completed the selection process, participants rank order their selected items from the modified list
  8. When prompted, participants can advance to the results page to view the ranking of each answer

Click for details on the uses of nominal groups and sample project descriptions