Compare methods

	Paired Comparison Method	Rank-Order Elicitation
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1988	1988
Originator	Cognitive anthropology tradition (Weller & Romney)	Cognitive anthropology tradition (Weller & Romney)
Type	Elicitation procedure for scaling or ranking items by a single criterion	Elicitation procedure for ordering items on a single criterion
Seminal source	Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative Research Methods Series 10. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780803930742	Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative Research Methods Series 10. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780803930742
Aliases	Method of Paired Comparisons, Pairwise Comparison Task, Pair-Comparison Ranking, Pairwise Judgment Elicitation	Ranking Task, Complete Ranking Elicitation, Ordinal Ranking Task, Rank Aggregation
Related	4	4
Summary	The paired comparison method is a systematic elicitation technique in which informants are shown every possible pair of items from a set and asked, for each pair, which member better fits a single criterion — which is sweeter, more dangerous, more prestigious, or more similar to a reference. Because every item is judged against every other item, the procedure forces fine, transitive discriminations that a one-shot ranking would blur. Aggregating the pairwise verdicts across informants yields a dominance or proximity matrix from which a stable rank order or an interval scale can be recovered.	Rank-order elicitation asks each informant to place a set of items into a complete order on a single criterion — from most to least important, severe, preferred, or typical — so that the whole domain is captured in one ordinal judgment per person. Unlike paired comparison, which gathers many local two-item choices, ranking obtains the global order directly, trading some redundancy for speed. Aggregating the individual rankings produces a group ordering, while a concordance statistic measures how strongly the informants agree.