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:
- Participants jot down some preliminary thoughts on a given question during a 5 minute silent period
- Each participants is then asked to contribute a single idea along in a round-robin format
- Each reponse is captured and displayed in a list on the screen.
- The moderator will ask for clarification as needed and ask if what is written captures the main concept/idea in each contribution
- 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
- 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)
- Once everyone has completed the selection process, participants rank order their selected items from the modified list
- 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