Research Tips

Advantages and Disadvantages of Ratings and Rankings

Rankings and ratings are not the same, but what are the advantages and disadvantages of using each?

The main advantage of ranking is that people are forced to indicate that they prefer one thing over another, and that may be more realistic than rating in situations in which people have to make a single choice (e.g. choosing which brand of computer to buy). The two disadvantages of rankings are that ranking is difficult for respondents when they are asked to rank a large number of items and many statistical techniques cannot use ranked data.

The main advantage of ratings are that in addition to showing that one thing is preferred over another, they show the whether the preference is slight, great, or somewhere in between. The main disadvantage of rating is that people often rate many things equally — particularly if the scale relates to something such as attribute importance.