Priorities and preferences in humanitarian needs assessments - Their measurement by rating and ranking methods

Humanitarian needs assessments seek to establish priorities for action and preferences of those whom the action will affect. Assessment teams collect data meant to capture the severity of problems and the situational aspects that matter in the evaluation of response options. When samples of stakeholders, such as key informants or relief workers, state priorities or preferences, the information chiefly produces ratings or rankings. Such data are ordinal. In summarizing them, we avoid operations that require metric variables (such as the arithmetic mean); yet we seek methods that produce aggregates with metric qualities (such as Borda counts). These have a higher information value and offer greater flexibility for subsequent analyses.